I was fortunate to be able to attend the inaugural conference of the newly founded Hong Kong Association for Digital Humanities. The conference was hosted by Javier Cha of Hong Kong University and Vincent Leung of Lignan University, and it was held on HKU’s Centennial campus this January. Because Hong Kong is a vertical city, the venue afforded beautiful views of the harbor.

Photographic evidence from my iPhone!

Keynotes by Miguel Escobar Varela (National University of Singapore) and Melanie Walsh (University of Washington) bookended the conference. Escobar Varela introduced a domain-specific model for classification and segmentation of Javanese wayang kulit (leather puppet performances), while Walsh emphasized the value of humanities expertise and the need for humanities researchers to claim a seat at the table. (One might say that Walsh gave us a sneak peek of this recent, collaborative preprint essay.) Taken together, the two keynotes highlighted both the opportunities for and challenges inherent in AI-informed research in the humanities, setting an agenda for the remainder of the conference.

The conference also featured three workshops, a poster session, a pre-organized panel, and four sessions of short papers describing work in progress. Although the papers in these sessions were submitted individually, the organizers formed coherent sessions that created exciting intersections between projects and researchers. I was delighted, as you might expect, to learn more about Jing Chen’s work on co-citations in Chinese poetry anthologies created from the 1500s to the 1800s. Papers on topics as diverse as literary style, genre, handwritten text recognition, network analysis, sentiment analysis, event-based information, mapping, and the history of AI itself balanced technological rigor with careful humanistic analysis. 

The HKADH2025 Reception also served as the Opening Ceremony of Hong Kong University’s exciting new Arts Technology Lab, which serves as a workspace with powerful computing resources and a flexible meeting space. It is coordinated by Jenny Kwok, who also gave a fascinating paper about Josephine Miles, an American woman who might be said to have been doing DH avant la lettre.

I presented on the problems of cleaning data for the STEMMA project and our processing pipeline, still in development, for using vector embeddings to reconcile and deduplicate this data. If you’ve heard me speak lately, you may have heard an expanded version of this material. The work is progressing and evolving daily, but I hope to write it up for publication once we feel like we’ve finished it. 

The conference concluded with a digital humanities hike called “Trails of Memory: The Battle of Hong Kong 1941”—a first for me (and a personal milestone after ankle surgery last autumn)! Chi Man Kwong of Hong Kong Baptist University not only led the walk from Victoria Peak to Pinewood Battery but offered a live demonstration of his GIS project, “Hong Kong 1941.” The excursion offered a rich historical perspective on the landscape as well as a final opportunity to chat with our new friends and colleagues.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen a GIS demo in situ. (You can see the brim of my Diamondbacks cap if you look carefully!)

You can see more photos of the event here: https://2025.hkadh.org/conference-highlights/.

Congratulations, and thanks again, to the organizers! I am grateful for the opportunity to be there, and I’ll look forward to seeing what’s next for this new organization and conference.