22–24October 2025
Past5th DARIAH-HR International Conference Digital Humanities & Heritage 2025
Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek – Academy of Arts and Culture & Faculty of Agrobiotechnical Sciences, Osijek, Croatia
Title: Retrieving Context, Re-centering Interpretation: AI Hermeneutics and the Democratization of Reading
Speaker: Prof. Jenny Kwok, Hong Kong Baptist University
Registration details: https://dariah.zoom.us/meeting/register/BvhAgdWHTh2eA0xODMpVnQ
In digital humanities, retrieval technologies have always mediated how we read, from concordances to search engines. With the advent of large language model and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) which was made available by the former, interpretation itself becomes procedural: machines now arguably perform a version of the critic’s movement between evidence and hypothesis, inviting debates and questions on the way (literary) reading might have been changed or even challenged. This talk introduces AI hermeneutics, an approach that treats RAG not as automation but as interpretive infrastructure, opening up an opportunity to integrate AI into the existing reading experience.
Drawing on experiments with the Conflict Archive on the Internet and conflict-era poetry, the project explores how retrieval systems can surface overlooked cultural memory while foregrounding the ethical boundaries of machine reading. It demonstrates how model “(mis-)readings” reveal the biases and expectations embedded in both human and computational interpretation.
The talk also considers questions of accessibility and sustainability— how lighter, discipline-specific models and transparent documentation can democratize advanced AI methods for scholars without extensive computing resources and its challenges. By reframing retrieval as a human-machine dialogue, AI hermeneutics invites the digital humanities community to see algorithmic mediation not as a threat to interpretation but as an opportunity to make the labor of reading visible and rewarded again.
Prof. Kwok is Assistant Professor at the Academy of Language and Culture, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU). She was awarded a CDH Visiting Fellowship at the University of Cambridge (2025) and will be a Gale Digital Scholar at the University of Oxford, 2026.
Prior to joining HKBU, she was Postdoctoral Fellow and later Research Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts, University of Hong Kong (HKU), where she also served as Lab Coordinator of the Arts Technology Lab. At HKU and HKBU, she contributed to the development of Digital Humanities teaching programs, including Introduction to digital humanities theories, tools, and methodologies, and advanced computational literary studies.
Her research explores how large language models can augment humanities inquiry, focusing on the intersection of AI and creative interpretation. She works on the application of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for contextualized reading of Irish Troubles poetry and on the design of AI workflows and agent-based systems for literary analysis. Her broader interests include creativity, generative AI, and the epistemic challenges posed by computational methods in the humanities. She has been invited to speak and deliver keynotes internationally, contributing perspectives on how computational advancements both challenge and renew humanistic practice. She also currently serves as a reviewer for several journals, including AI & Society and the Journal of Cultural Analytics, and as guest editor for the ongoing Journal of Open Humanities Data special collection on benchmarking in digital humanities.
22–24October 2025
PastJosip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek – Academy of Arts and Culture & Faculty of Agrobiotechnical Sciences, Osijek, Croatia
7November 2025
PastEdinburgh Futures Institute, The University of Edinburgh