CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks – Reimagining Humanities Education: Interdisciplinary Cultivation in the Era of Digital Intelligence

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Dear users,

On April 21st at 12:30 pm (CEST), we are pleased to host the third session of the CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026. The talk will be given by Dr. Beibei Zhan and is titled “Reimagining Humanities Education: Interdisciplinary Cultivation in the Era of Digital Intelligence.” Dr. Zhan will share her experience developing a structured pedagogical approach for integrating AI and digital methods into humanities teaching in the era of “Digital Intelligence.”

In the „Digital Intelligence“ era, the rapid evolution of AI and Big Data is fundamentally reshaping the production and dissemination of knowledge, necessitating a transition in humanities education from traditional paradigms to an integrated, technology-enhanced ecosystem. This lecture proposes a transformative framework for cultivating humanities students under the „New Liberal Arts“ initiative, aiming to bridge the gap between classical erudition and computational science through a Six-Dimensional Structural Model. This model integrates problem-solving, knowledge synthesis, tool literacy, task practice, organizational collaboration, and ethical governance into a cohesive strategy, driving research through authentic socio-cultural inquiries while balancing technical proficiency with rigorous responsibility.

Central to this pedagogical shift are the practical innovations at Yuelu Academy (Hunan University), specifically the „Digital Intelligence Micro-course Cluster“ and the „Humanities-AI Seminar“. The Micro-course Cluster operates on a three-tiered conceptual framework: first, establishing General Digital Literacy to foster computational thinking and a critical understanding of AI tools; second, developing Discipline-Specific Core Reflection, where students utilize digital methods such as metadata encoding and text mining to innovate traditional tasks like version tracing and semantic analysis; and third, encouraging Interdisciplinary Frontier Exploration, which empowers students to lead original research in cutting-edge fields such as Linguistic Intelligence, Cultural Visualization, and Digital Geography (GIS). Complementing this structured approach, the Humanities-AI Seminar offers a self-organized, „Human-in-the-loop“ community where students, experts, and industry engineers co-create knowledge through real-world case studies, such as utilizing OpenAI APIs for structured knowledge extraction from historical archives. By synthesizing systematic training with open-ended collaborative research, these models demonstrate how humanities students can evolve into versatile scholars capable of navigating and shaping the global digital landscape.

About the speaker:

Dr. Beibei Zhan is an Associate Professor and Director of the Digital Humanities Center at Yuelu Academy, Hunan University, holding dual doctorates in Computer Vision (Kingston University) and Sinology (SOAS University of London). Her research focuses on the intersection of Ming-Qing history, Digital Humanities and Humanistic Intelligence. She currently serves as an Executive Member of the Technical Committee on Computing Applications, China Computer Federation (CCF), and as a Council Representative of the Digital Humanities Development Alliance of China.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us at ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will be streamed via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser,” and enter your name.

To the lecture

You can find the full programm of CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026 here. Further talks will also be announced on our blog as well as on Mastodon and BlueSky.

 

Yours,

CrossAsia Team

 

*By participating, you grant the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and its subordinate institutions free of charge all rights of usage of pictures and videos taken of you during this lecture presentation. This declaration of consent is valid in terms of time and space without restrictions and for usage in all media, including analogue and digital usage. It includes image processing and the usage of photos in composite illustrations. German law will apply.

CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks – Getting the Lines Right: Layout Analysis as the Critical First Step for Tibetan Newspaper HTR

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Dear users,

On March 24th at 12:30 pm (CET), we are pleased to host the second session of the CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026. The talk will be given by Dr. Franz Xaver Erhard and is titled “Getting the Lines Right: Layout Analysis as the Critical First Step for Tibetan Newspaper HTR.” Dr. Erhard will introduce his the Divergent Discourses project, as well as TransYolo, a custom Python workflow to solve the layout analysis bottleneck in digitizing historical Tibetan newspapers.

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) has matured rapidly in recent years, and for many document types, the core recognition task is largely solved. Yet when researchers turn to historical Tibetan newspapers, progress stalls — not because HTR models fail, but because the lines are never correctly identified in the first place. This talk argues that layout analysis, not transcription, is the true bottleneck in Tibetan newspaper digitization, and that no single off-the-shelf tool is adequate for the task.

Tibetan newspapers such as the Tibet Daily (TID) collection present a combination of challenges that expose the limits of general-purpose layout tools: dense multi-column page designs with inconsistent column spacing, mixed scripts (Tibetan, Chinese, Latin), varying typefaces and handwriting styles across issues and periods, and the physical realities of digitized print — page skew, gutter distortion, and uneven illumination. These properties interact in ways that defeat standard segmentation approaches, producing incorrect line detections, boundary bleed-across, and broken reading order — all before a single character is recognized.

Transkribus, the dominant platform for historical HTR in the humanities, offers built-in layout analysis through its field models. These work well for their intended use cases, but Tibetan newspaper material sits well outside that scope: column layouts confuse region assignment, high line density triggers false positives, and the platform’s limited configurability makes targeted correction difficult. The lesson is not that Transkribus falls short, but that specialized material demands specialized solutions.

To meet this need, the talk introduces TransYolo, a custom Python workflow developed within the Divergent Discourses project (AHRC/DFG). TransYolo uses a YOLO model trained specifically on Tibetan newspaper pages to detect text lines, assigns detections to text regions previously detected with Transkribus, reconstructs reading order, and exports Transkribus-compatible PAGE XML. The example shows what becomes possible when layout analysis is treated as a problem in its own right.

About the speaker:

Dr. Franz Xaver Erhard is a Tibetologist specializing in Tibetan literature, biography, and cultural history, with close to a decade of fieldwork experience in Lhasa. He is the Principal Investigator of the DFG/AHRC cooperative project „Divergent Discourses: Processes of Narrative Construction in Tibet, 1955–1962,“ which compiles and analyses the first modern corpus of historical Tibetan newspapers using digital humanities methods, including computational tools for text recognition and natural language processing, to trace how divergent narratives emerged and evolved in PRC and exile publications during one of the most consequential periods of Tibetan history.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us at ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will be streamed and recorded via Webex. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser,” and enter your name.

To the lecture

You can find the full programm of CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026 here. Further talks will also be announced on our blog as well as on Mastodon and BlueSky.

 

Yours,

CrossAsia Team

CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks – AI for the Humanities: A Case of Manchu OCR

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Dear users,

On February 3rd at 12:30 pm (CET), we are pleased to host the first session of the CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026. The talk will be given by Dr. Yan Hon Michael Chung and is titled “AI for the Humanities: A Case of Manchu OCR.” Dr. Chung will introduce the development pipeline for creating an OCR model for Manchu-language documents and share his reflections on applying AI to humanities research.

Manchu, today an endangered language, was once the official language of China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644–1911). The Qing state produced an enormous corpus of Manchu-language documents, many of which have been digitized and made publicly available by archives and libraries worldwide. Despite this abundance of scanned materials, there is still no reliable, publicly accessible optical character recognition (OCR) system for Manchu, posing a major bottleneck for historical research.

This presentation introduces an end-to-end Manchu OCR system developed by fine-tuning a vision–language model (VLM), and uses it as a case study to reflect on the broader challenges of applying AI to humanities research. It identifies three structural constraints that distinguish humanities-oriented AI development from commercial or industrial settings: the scarcity of labeled training data, the unusually high accuracy requirements demanded by scholarly research, and the limited computational resources available to most humanities scholars.

To address these constraints, the project adopts a small-model, data-centric strategy. The OCR model is trained using a combination of large-scale synthetic data and carefully curated historical samples. Specifically, a LLaMA-3.2-11B Vision model is fine-tuned using approximately 60,000 synthetic Manchu images alongside 20,000 Manchu word images extracted from real Qing-era documents. The resulting model achieves up to 96% accuracy on unseen, real-world scanned Manchu sources.

The OCR pipeline is further enhanced through a custom Manchu word detection and segmentation model, combined with a post-processing large language model for typographical correction. Together, these components form a complete, practical Manchu OCR system built with state-of-the-art vision–language and language models. Beyond presenting technical results, this presentation argues that carefully constrained, accuracy-driven AI systems offer a viable and sustainable path for AI research in the humanities.

About the speaker:

Dr. Michael Chung is an Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Chung received his PhD in history from Emory University in 2025, and his BA and MPhil from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2012 and 2016 respectively. Chung’s research centers on the early Qing dynasty, with a focus on the transfer of European artillery technology and the formation of the Hanjun Eight Banners. As a digital humanist, Chung is currently developing a Manchu OCR system based on a fine-tuned vision-language model.

 

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, please contact us at ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

The lecture will be streamed and recorded via Webex. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the respective button “To the lecture” below, follow the link “join via browser,” and enter your name.

To the lecture

You can find the full programm of CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026 here. Further talks will also be announced on our blog as well as on Mastodon and BlueSky.

 

Yours,

CrossAsia Team

CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks Launching in February 2026

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Dear colleagues,

We are delighted to announce that the CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks will return in February 2026.

Originally launched between winter 2023 and spring 2024, the first DH Lunchtalk Series was warmly received by our community. Building on this success, the CrossAsia team and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) went on to co-host the international conference “Charting the European D-SEA: Digital Scholarship in East Asian Studies” in Berlin from 8–12 July 2024, bringing together around 120 participants from 19 countries and regions (read more).

In light of this strong engagement and our ongoing commitment to digital scholarship, we are pleased to relaunch the Lunchtalks as an online forum where scholars can share project updates, present new tools and methods, offer methodological insights, and showcase innovative research in Digital Asian Studies.

Between February and June 2026, the DH Lunchtalks will take place monthly. While the 2023–2024 season focused primarily on training in digital tools and platforms, the upcoming series will feature 60-minute lunchtime talks (including Q&A) by distinguished speakers presenting their latest digital research projects. The currently confirmed programme is as follows:

  1. February 3
    Prof. Michael Yan Hon CHUNG (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
    AI for Endangered Documentary Archives: Manchu OCR
  2. March 24
    Dr. Franz Xaver Erhard (Leipzig University)
    Getting the Lines Right: Layout Analysis as the Critical First Step for Tibetan Newspaper HTR
  3. April 21
    Dr. ZHAN Beibei (Yuelu Academy, Hunan University)
    Reimagining Humanities Education: Interdisciplinary Cultivation in the Era of Digital Intelligence
  4. May 21
    Dr. CHEN Shih-Pei (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) & Prof. Mariana Favila-Vázquez (CIESAS–Unidad Ciudad de México)
    Treating a Genre as a Knowledge System: A Digital Research Methodology for Studying Chinese Local Gazetteers
  5. June 9
    Dr. CHOI Donghyeok (Hong Kong Baptist University)
    From Reading to Discovery: AI-Assisted Workflows for East Asian Historical Texts
  6. June 25
    Dr. Rafał Jan Felbur (Heidelberg University)
    Born-digital Dictionary of Early Chinese Buddhist Translations

 

All DH Lunchtalks will take place from 12:30 to 13:30 (Central European Time) and will be held online via Webex. Further details for each session, including abstracts and access links, will be announced in advance on the CrossAsia blog. The first talk, by Prof. Michael Yan Hon Chung, will be announced shortly on CrossAsia.

If you have any questions about the DH Lunchtalks, or if you are interested in proposing a future talk and sharing your own digital research, please contact Dr. Jing Hu at jing.hu@sbb.spk-berlin.de.

We look forward to welcoming many of you to the CrossAsia DH Lunchtalks 2026!

 

Yours,

CrossAsia Team