HKUST joined “Proofread the Classics with AI” in 2026, using artificial intelligence to help volunteers proofread classical texts. HKUST is the first overseas university to take part in the programme, which reflects its leading position in the fields of classical texts and Chinese culture.

The programme was set up in 2024 by the National Committee for the Compilation and Research of Ancient Books, Peking University’s Digital Humanities Research Centre and ByteDance Philanthropy. More than 40,000 volunteers have taken part and more than 20,000 titles have been completed. In 2026, 68 universities and 76 faculties are taking part, and the programme carries the digital proofreading of the Global Hanji Hebi project on the Shidian Guji platform; the first batch of 83 rare titles held abroad is now online. The platform also has a mobile version for proofreading, so the public can join at any time.

HKUST takes an active part in the project and supports the digitisation of traditional Chinese texts. The Division of Humanities brings its digital humanities teaching into the programme, including text processing, corpus building, and evaluation of how well OCR and named-entity models perform. Students on the platform’s courses work as volunteer proofreaders, checking machine transcriptions against the received text. This gives later machine learning and other researchers a dependable corpus, and adds to the international digital humanities community.

The programme is still recruiting students. Students who are interested can contact the HKUST Humanities and Digital Technologies Research Platform by email. They will be offered an internship and paid according to the amount of work they do.