Playing Heaven

The “Playing Heaven” team cordially invites intellectual historians, specialists in early modern East Asia, and scholars in the digital humanities to attend the project launch events to be held at the University of Hong Kong on 1 June 2026 and at DH2026 in Daejeon, South Korea on 28 July 2026.

“Playing Heaven” is an inter-university collaboration based in Hong Kong and Singapore, and one of the inaugural recipients of the Schmidt Sciences Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) grant. The project seeks to rethink the intellectual and cultural history of early modern East Asia with the development of a domain-specific artificial intelligence system. Rather than treating philosophical schools, literary traditions, and cultural practices as fixed categories, the project approaches them as historically contingent formations shaped by processes of transmission, adaptation, and reinterpretation. In doing so, it addresses a set of persistent challenges: the separation of fields such as philosophy, literature, religion, and the arts in modern academic institutions; the linguistic and stylistic diversity of literary Sinitic and various East Asian vernaculars, including Korean and Manchu; and the tension between close reading and broader historical generalization. By integrating large language models and vision-language models into this research, the project aims not simply to automate analysis but to expand the range of questions that historians can ask and the forms of evidence they can meaningfully interpret.

The launch events will introduce the project’s core research agenda, outline its methodological framework, present prototype systems and early findings, and reflect on new possibilities enabled by agentic AI. The event is intended as a forum for exchange and reflection, bringing together historians and digital humanities practitioners to consider how transformer-based machine learning opens new computational approaches to the history of ideas, cultural history, and multilingual historical research—and, more provocatively, how AI agents may begin to move beyond heuristic assistance toward automating substantial portions of a historian’s traditional workflow. For further information, please contact Javier Cha (javiercha@hku.hk).

Organizers

Sponsors

The “Playing Heaven” project is supported by the Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI), a program of Schmidt Sciences. The inaugural workshop at the University of Hong Kong is jointly organized and sponsored by the Big Data Studies Lab and the Institute of Transnational History of China at the University of Hong Kong.