Invitation to HIST4037 Open Sessions
Automating the Past: Artificial Intelligence and the Historian’s Craft
We are opening two sessions of the capstone seminar HIST4037 to students in the HDT programme, History majors, and anyone interested in the concrete applications of AI in historical research.
Location: Arts Tech Lab, Room 4.40-4.41, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong
Time: 09:00 AM – 10:50 AM (for both sessions)
Requirement: Please bring your own notebook computer. iPads and tablet PCs are not suitable for the exercises.
Abstract
Session 1: Computer Vision and Historical Research
Date: September 23
With guest lecturer Solomon Ho, we will explore how computer vision and transformer-based OCR can be applied to messy historical documents. Solomon will demonstrate how to fine-tune and use YOLO on a large dataset of Qing-dynasty civil service examination papers (87,996 pages) to identify document layouts, remove noise, and extract text and metadata.
Session 2: Nabi X – How to Create LLM-Friendly Knowledge Bases
Date: September 30
Guest lecturers Eric Chow and Donghyeok Choi will introduce Nabi X, an educational AI platform
from the Big Data Studies Lab. Participants will learn how to build a domain-specific
retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system connected to a user-curated knowledge base.
Learn more about the platform here: Nabi X Project Page.