Xu Authors Chapter and Article on Childhood in Mid 20th Century Hong Kong and Taiwan Using Ethnographic Records and AI
Posted: 1/8/2026 (CSDE Research)
SDE Affiliate Jing Xu (Anthropology) authored a chapter in a new book titled, Rethinking Childhood in Modern Chinese History. In this chapter, Xu draws on ethnographic records on Chinese children and childhood in the mid twentieth century that reflect three layers of marginality: social margins – ordinary, rural, working-class families in Hong Kong and Taiwan; historiographical margins – ethnographic materials are outside the conventional scope of ‘archival’ history on Chinese childhood; and intellectual margins – children at the periphery of these ethnographies. Xu also presents her rediscovery of a significant yet unpublished fieldnotes archive collected by the late anthropologists Arthur P. Wolf and Margery Wolf between 1958 and 1960 in the world’s first systematic, anthropological research on Han Chinese children. In a separate article, Xu draws on these fieldnotes and combines anthropological expertise and various AI technologies to analyze natural observation texts about children’s peer-interactions. Xu transformed raw fieldnotes into a text-as-data pipeline, discovered how ethnographic close-reading and AI technologies can complement and augment each other’s value, and shed light on the similarities and differences in how machines and humans learn and make sense of morality.