Javier Cha is a digital historian and medievalist who uses technology to explore the East Asian world a millennium ago and also aims to prepare the historical profession for an era of data abundance and automation. His research spans the translation of primary sources in classical Chinese, machine-assisted historical methods, and experimental projects that address the challenges posed by big data and artificial intelligence in the humanities.

Cha has secured over HK$16 million (US$2 million) in competitive grants and fellowships from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, the Academy of Korean Studies, the Korea Foundation, the University of Hong Kong, Seoul National University, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Most recently, he has been selected as one of the inaugural recipients of the Schmidt Sciences Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) award of up to HK$5.3 million (US$680,000) for the “Playing Heaven” project, which aims to leverage transformer-based machine learning to develop sound computational methodologies for the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Neo-Confucianism.

He currently serves on the editorial boards of several leading digital humanities journals, including Journal of Cultural Analytics, Computational Humanities Research, and the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing. In July 2025, he delivered the opening keynote at the DH2025 international conference in Lisbon, Portugal, organized by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations.

Prior to joining the University of Hong Kong, he was a founding member of the Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities and taught at the interdisciplinary College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University. He places strong emphasis on sustained mentorship and maintains long-term connections with students and advisees. His former students and lab members have gone on to pursue postgraduate studies at institutions including Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Columbia, USC, and LSE and led successful professional and executive careers at Google, Microsoft, Figma, and other major firms. Several former students and advisees have also founded impactful startup companies and received early-career recognition, including placement on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list.

RESEARCH

Medieval Korea

Cha specializes in the sociopolitical, intellectual, and literary history of medieval Korea. His work explores how bureaucratic centralization, aristocratic kinship networks, and the localization of Sinitic philosophical and literary traditions gave rise to distinct Korean Confucian formations and practices.

His first monograph, currently in progress, examines the long and uneven process through which the medieval Korean society became more bureaucratically centralized and how the yangban emerged as a resilient, de facto hereditary aristocracy. The book approaches the rise of the yangban as the outcome of centuries of patronage, alliance, and strategic marriage. Monarchs, regents, and powerful ministers elevated loyal followers; ambitious provincial newcomers sought to convert fragile political opportunity into lasting privilege for their descendants. Methodologically, the project combines traditional archival research with graph-based “digital reading.” A highlight of this study is Cha’s digital scholarly edition of the Andong Kwŏn Genealogy of 1476 (Andong Kwŏn ssi Sŏnghwabo 安東權氏成化譜), a source widely regarded for its reliability and unusually detailed documentation of both paternal and maternal descendants. By modeling the genealogy in Neo4j, a graph database management system, Cha reconstructs connections that cut across the compiler’s organizational boundaries. This approach makes visible structural shifts in marriage patterns and in-group consolidation that would be difficult to discern through linear reading alone.

A follow-up study reexamines the formation of Neo-Confucian schools and the localization of highbrow Sinitic literary practices. The project revisits the seventeenth-century retrospective lineage constructions that reorganized earlier developments into tidy genealogies, which narrowed Neo-Confucianism to philosophy despite its deep entanglement with literary archaism and reform. To widen the field of inquiry, Cha incorporates transformer-based machine learning to trace connections between intellectual developments and rhetorical and stylistic form. In preparation for this work, he has completed a two-volume team translation of the writings of Sŏng Hyŏn 成俔 (1439–1504) and secured funding from Schmidt Sciences’ HAVI to advance AI-assisted research in intellectual and literary history.

Big Data Studies Lab

Founded in Seoul by Cha in 2019 and relocated to the University of Hong Kong in 2022, the Big Data Studies Lab (BDSL) conducts experimental research on how the humanities can respond to the structural transformations of the Zettabyte era. BDSL addresses the challenges of working with sources distributed across networked servers and engaging with born-digital artifacts, virtual environments, and synthetic materials generated through artificial intelligence. Central to the lab’s mission is updating digital humanities methodologies for Web 2.0 and beyond, particularly in light of big data’s defining characteristics—the 3Vs of volume, velocity, and variety.

BDSL is currently supported by internal research funding at the University of Hong Kong as well as Schmidt Sciences’ HAVI. From 2019 to 2022, the lab received the generous support of Seoul National University’s prestigious Innovative and Pioneering Young Researchers Scheme.

TEACHING

Cha regards teaching as a form of intellectual apprenticeship. He did not arrive in the humanities effortlessly, and academic writing came to him through a lot of persistence. That experience continues to shape his classroom. He encourages students to treat scholarship as a craft refined over time. His courses emphasize clarity of argument, careful reading, methodological self-awareness, and, most importantly, the willingness to revise one’s assumptions when confronted with new evidence and perspective. In his practice, teaching and research form a continuous pipeline: students are invited to test ideas, confront challenges, pivot when necessary, and gradually develop the confidence to navigate unfamiliar intellectual terrain.

At HKU, Cha serves as RPG Coordinator for the Humanities and Digital Technologies discipline. He provides MPhil and PhD students with formal training in the canonical digital humanities literature and the sound application of computational methods in humanities research, with an emphasis that technical proficiency and interpretive rigour must develop together. Students are expected not only to conduct research in digital environments effectively but also to understand the epistemological and ethical questions that our reliance on technology raises.

In 2025, Cha launched Nabi X, a modular and responsible AI-assisted learning platform developed by his BDSL team with support from HKU’s Teaching Development Grant and Teaching Development and Language Enhancement Grant. Nabi X seeks to demystify artificial intelligence by allowing students to work directly with curated datasets, word embeddings, and knowledge graphs instead of treating AI as a black box.

Cha is the recipient of the Faculty of Arts’ Teaching Excellence Award 2024–25 in the Teaching Innovation in E-learning category.