Building systematic digital solutions for cultural heritage development

At the 2025 WIC Cultural Heritage Digitalization Forum, experts emphasized how digital technology is reshaping the protection and transmission of culture. Among the participants was Zhu Qingsheng, a professor and chief expert of Image Lab of Peking University who highlighted the importance of building systematic solutions.

He noted that cultural heritage is made up of objects, images, and the documents behind them, and that China was the first to begin large-scale digitalization starting with ancient inscriptions. Today, this effort is expanding internationally, opening new possibilities for collaboration.

Zhu pointed to China's advances in micro-trace scanning, which captures invisible details with industrial precision, and the IIML indexing system, whose development started over 30 years ago, as examples of how digital humanities can make relics "understandable, attractive, and alive."