Digital tools unlock ancient texts

According to ByteDance, Shidian Guji's OCR technology currently achieves an accuracy rate of 96 to 97 percent, though performance still varies depending on the condition of the original materials.

The platform has also introduced additional tools to help standardize variant characters, translate classical Chinese into modern Chinese and assist researchers in organizing and analyzing textual resources.

Yet despite such advances, technology remains only part of the answer.

Yang Hao, an associate researcher at PKUDH, emphasized that technology and culture play different but complementary roles.

"Technology is the shell, while the humanities are the core," he said. "Technology can help culture travel faster, but only people can help culture travel farther."

That view is echoed by many volunteers on the platform, who have found that while AI performs relatively well at basic sentence segmentation, it can still struggle to understand the structure and logic of complex classical Chinese narratives.