Contributor, Chinese Studies
Aliona Ikonnikova is a researcher working at the intersection of Digital Humanities, China Studies, and artificial intelligence. She holds a Master’s degree in Contemporary Asian Studies from Vilnius University and a Bachelor’s degree in Informatics. With over ten years of experience in the IT field, primarily in application development and software quality assurance, she brings a technical perspective to the study of China.
Her research interests focus on the cultural, philosophical, and religious dimensions of China, as well as contemporary China-related questions surrounding artificial intelligence. These include AI and society, AI governance, the political dimensions of AI, and emerging tendencies toward the sacralization of AI. Her broader academic interests include digital religion and digital anthropology, particularly the ways digital technologies interact with religious practices, cultural narratives, authority, and belief.
Her work combines approaches from China Studies, religious studies, and Digital Humanities, including discourse analysis, computational text analysis, and netnography. She also develops applications and computational tools that support humanities research and the analysis of textual data.
She is currently applying to a PhD programme, where she plans to combine her background in Informatics with Digital Humanities methods to investigate the semantic and philosophical development of the concept of Tiānmìng (天命) in classical Chinese thought. The project examines Tiānmìng in relation to political legitimacy, morality, cosmological order, and human agency, using computational text analysis alongside philosophical and hermeneutic interpretation.