AI Fluency and Digital Methods

Art History Research Workshop

AI Fluency and Digital Methods

Date: 4 June 2026 (Tuesday)
Time: 11am-12:30pm
Venue: Room 10.28, 10/f, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Registration: required, first come first served. Please register by sending an email to arthist@hku.hk.
State your 1) full name, 2) degree (eg. BA, MA, Mphil, PhD), and 3) programme/ major (eg. Art History). A confirmation email will be sent before 29 May 2026, 5pm.

This workshop introduces AI-assisted research and digital methods for art historians. Drawing on Provenance Wiki, a prototype digital tool for processing archival documents, the workshop demonstrates how AI can help organize evidence, extract structured information, generate research questions, and visualize relationships among objects, people, places, and institutions. Participants will also engage with the broader issue of AI fluency: how to understand what AI tools can and cannot do, how to evaluate their outputs, and how digital workflows can be integrated into humanistic research without replacing scholarly interpretation. No technical knowledge or prior experience with AI is required.

Speaker: Mengge Cao is the postdoctoral scholar at the Center for the Art of East Asia, Department of Art History, University of Chicago. His work combines art historical research and digital curation through the Dispersed Chinese Art Digitization Project. Mengge received his PhD in art history from Princeton University in 2024, where his dissertation focused on painting formats and viewers’ experiences in middle-period China from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries. His research has appeared in Archives of Asian Art.