From “I” to “We”: making digital humanities future‑ready at HKBU

At the Symposium on Future Readiness of Digital Humanities and Archives supported by the International Activities Programme under the Research Committee, keynote speaker Tim Cole, Professor of Social History at the University of Bristol, invited us to reimagine digital humanities as a fundamentally collaborative practice. Drawing on three decades of Holocaust research, Cole argued that meaningful innovation happens when historians, archivists, geographers, computer scientists, and designers work as a “we”, building tools that help users ask new questions rather than fix old answers.

Professor Cole showcased mapping as a process, not a product. Using GIS alongside corpus linguistics and simple computational models, his team layered heterogeneous datasets to reveal patterns and prompt archival return visits. For example, mapping arrests of Italian Jews exposed different spatial signatures for German and Italian authorities—illuminating the role of local collaborators and local knowledge. Beyond presence, Professor Cole urged us to visualize absence— such as mapping the “silences” in survivor testimonies along evacuation routes, and computationally surfacing “ghost husbands” in a 1945 census, a poignant lens on community wide ambiguous loss.

Professor Cole’s takeaway for future readiness is clear: build flexible, time aware interfaces that can ingest diverse archival forms; treat models as heuristics, not reality; and design visualizations that attend to materiality, social relations, and emotion—not just latitude and longitude. In doing so, archives and digital humanities together can make new knowledge and new care possible.

Chair Professor in Modern Chinese History Wong Man Kong, Director of the Academy of Chinese, History, Religion and Philosophy, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, delivered the opening remarks. He noted that HKBU’s research culture—linking technologists, humanists, and archives—gives that ‘we’ a place to work. By catalysing global dialogue, deepening archival engagement, and cultivating emerging scholars, the university aligns its priorities with cross disciplinary digital humanities.

Chaired by HKBU's Professor Wong Man Kong and Professor Kwong Chi Man, the conference brings together experts from academia, government, and NGOs to address key issues in digital documentation and development.