Michael Schimmelpfennig's research interests do hardly fit categories of being a specialist in a particular research area. In a more traditional sense he rather regards himself as a sinologist. He studied Chinese archeaology before he developed a deep interest in early traditional Chinese literature and poetry, specialising in the history of textual reception and commentarial interpretation. In more recent work he engages with the history of meaning of Chinese terms for conceptual ideas, in particular those concerning human relations in and beyond the family in China's past and present. Even more recently he began to explore the possibilities offered by Digital Humanities in Chinese Studies, focussing on the computational analysis of large corpora of traditional Chinese texts, in particular the ways to meaningfully employ algorithms in analysing multilayered texts, i. e. text with multiple commentaries.
