TRACES Supports Public Seminar on AI and Historical Research
- Damien Shum
- Sep 19
- 2 min read
Updated: Sep 25
TRACES is delighted to share and support a special seminar hosted by Professor Javier Cha, Automating the Past: AI and the Historian’s Craft. As part of his final-year capstone course, two sessions are being opened to the wider student community, offering a rare opportunity to explore the cutting-edge use of artificial intelligence in historical research.
On September 23, guest lecturer Solomon Ho will demonstrate how computer vision and transformer-based optical recognition can make sense of large collections of historical documents, including the Qing dynasty’s civil service examination papers. Students will see how tools like YOLO and open-weight OCR models can identify layouts, reduce noise, and extract meaningful text and metadata from nearly 88,000 pages of messy archival sources.
On September 30, guest lecturers Eric Chow and Donghyeok Choi will present Nabi X, a new educational AI platform developed at HKU. The session will show participants how to build project-specific retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, creating knowledge bases that allow AI to process historical data more effectively.
For students, these hands-on sessions are not only a chance to learn technical skills, but also an invitation to reflect on how digital tools are reshaping the craft of history. By linking humanities with cutting-edge AI, they embody the spirit of transdisciplinarity at the heart of TRACES.
TRACES supports this seminar because it demonstrates how emerging scholars can think beyond disciplinary silos, bridging technology and humanities to address complex research challenges. We believe such opportunities inspire students to innovate, collaborate, and expand their academic horizons.
📅 Dates: September 23 & 30
🕘 Time: 9:00–11:50 AM
📍 Venue: Arts Technology Lab, Run Run Shaw Tower
We warmly encourage our community to take part in this seminar and discover new possibilities at the intersection of AI and historical research.
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