Transforming Research and Teaching in Chinese History with Digital Tools

This workshop offers a forum for sharing insights and collaboratively exploring how digital tools are reshaping historical research and teaching in Chinese studies. We will begin with a concise introduction to foundational concepts in digital humanities, using Chinese historical research as core examples to demonstrate applicable methods. The session will include practical demonstrations of using digital tools to locate and analyze historical figures and place names in classical Chinese texts and records from imperial China, followed by a discussion of how text markup and collaborative annotation can deepen engagement with these sources. We draw on open resources such as the China Biographical Database (CBDB), the China Historical Geographic Information System (CHGIS), and the Chinese Text Project (CTEXT). We will also examine the transformative potential of LLMs, considering how AI can support text generation, question design, and the creation of engaging educational content for Chinese history. Throughout, we emphasize integrating digital humanities tools into the research and learning of Chinese history, addressing both the challenges and opportunities presented by digitization and artificial intelligence.

Lik Hang Tsui is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese and History at the City University of Hong Kong, where he is also the Associate Director of the Talent and Education Development Office. Prior to joining CityU, he worked as a Departmental Lecturer in Classical Chinese at the University of Oxford and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University with the China Biographical Database (CBDB). He has published on middle period Chinese history, especially on epistolary culture and urban history, as well as on digital humanities methods for studying Chinese history. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. He has also held fellowships at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and University of Western Australia in Perth. Tsui co-edits book reviews for Cultural History and serves as an associate editor for IJHAC: A Journal of Digital Humanities. He is also the co-convenor of the Digital Learning and Literacy cluster in his College in CityU.

Host or Publisher Asian Studies