Mariana Zorkina is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, where she studies the history of science and systems of knowledge organisation in premodern China. Her research focuses on the evolution of the organisation of imperial and daily-use category books (leishu 類書), combining qualitative analysis with computational methods. She received her PhD from the University of Zurich with a dissertation on the concept of ‘things’ (wu 物) in early and medieval China, examining the conceptualisation of humans as one kind of wu and its implications for philosophical, political, and literary thought. During her studies, she spent time as a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked on a digital humanities project at the University of Strasbourg. She is the founder of Methods in Sinology lecture series and serves as a board member and editor in Digital Orientalist.