Reappraising Modern China @ HKADH 2026

On January 23–24, 2025, I was in Hong Kong to attend the Hong Kong Association for Digital Humanities (HKADH) conference held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. This year’s theme was Distant Reading | Viewing | Perceiving in the Age of AI.

The conference featured a wide range of innovative, cutting-edge research applying AI and digital methods to Asian studies and beyond. Among the presentations that struck me most were the keynote by Lauren Tilton (University of Richmond), in collaboration with Taylor Arnold, who presented their National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH)-funded project using AI to model gender bias and narrative point-of-view patterns in U.S. sitcoms, as well as their excellent open-access toolbox, Distant Viewing Lab.

Also particularly fascinating were short papers by early-career Chinese and Korean researchers, including work on the reconstruction of Chinese maritime routes using GIS and simulation (Hongpeng Luo, Tianjin University); a reinterpretation of transnational negotiation networks and the dual roles of Hong merchants in the Qing dynasty (Liqiao Ni, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen); and the use of GraphRAG to map the anatomy of villains in anime films (Gayeon Kim, The Academy of Korean Studies).

I was pleased to join my colleagues Thorben Pelzer (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) and Christian Henriot (Aix-Marseille University) in presenting the panel From Computation to Interpretation: Reappraising Transformations in Modern China through the Lens of AI, which I coordinated.

This panel explored how artificial intelligence and computational methods can be productively integrated into historical research on modern China, shifting attention from opaque technical sophistication to historically interpretable results. Taking as its empirical focus the transformation of Chinese knowledge elites from the late Qing dynasty to the early People’s Republic (1850s–1950s), the panel addressed two interrelated questions: the resilience of elites amid political and institutional upheaval, and the complex participation of Chinese actors in an emerging global order beyond nationalist or “impact–response” frameworks. It also situated these questions within broader methodological challenges posed by fragmented sources, national historiographical divides, uneven digitization, and historians’ limited training in AI-based tools.

Our panel combined epistemological reflection with three concrete case studies. Christian Henriot introduced the ENP-China digital ecosystem, including interoperable textual, biographical, and geospatial databases, as a historian-centred infrastructure designed to bridge computation and interpretation while ensuring transparency and reproducibility. Thorben Pelzer demonstrated how large-scale data mining and clustering of the Taishū jinji-roku—a vast Japanese imperial biographical corpus—can illuminate patterns of imperial governance and transnational entanglements in East Asia. Finally, Cécile Armand (in collaboration with Christian Henriot) presented a computational reassessment of over 4,600 Chinese PhD holders trained abroad between 1905 and 1962, revealing divergent intellectual trajectories shaped by revolution, exile, repression, and diasporic knowledge production. Together, the papers demonstrate how hybrid AI-assisted approaches can expand historical inquiry across scales without sacrificing humanistic rigor.

The conference was followed by the New Horizons for AI Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities conference, organized by the University of Chicago in Hong Kong. This momentum will be extended next summer with the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) conference, to be held in Daejeon, South Korea. Together, these events testify to the extraordinary dynamism of AI-driven humanities research in Asia.

Cécile Armand

Ancienne élève de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (2006), agrégée d'histoire (2009), docteure en histoire (2017), mes travaux portent sur… Lire la suite

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