Wing Kiu Lau ’26 Examines Wikipedia, AI, and the Future of History

Growing up in Hong Kong, Lau lived near the site where the Kowloon Walled City once stood. By her childhood, the notorious settlement had been demolished-it was razed between 1993 and 1994-and replaced with a manicured public park, styled as a classical Chinese garden.

As a child, Lau was mostly unaware of what had existed before the park. It was once a dense enclave, with "buildings atop buildings" that housed roughly 33,000 people within six and a half acres. Over time, though, the Walled City began to resurface around her-in films, documentaries, video games, comics, and public conversations about Hong Kong identity.

"My generation's become more and more interested in this topic," she said recently. "Though the city doesn't physically exist anymore, people keep representing it in different ways."

Those competing representations became the foundation of her honors project, the first interdisciplinary study at Bowdoin that combines computer science and history, Lau's two majors.

Faculty in both departments were initially skeptical about the feasibility of her project, said Visiting Lecturer in Computer Science Christopher Martin, who, along with Assistant Professor of History and Asian Studies Guo Jue, advised Lau. "History is a field so focused on studying and preserving different perspectives and viewpoints, while in computer science we strive to find objective answers to problems and...often leave behind the old 'sub-optimal' ways of thinking," Martin said.

"Yet," he added, his advisee allayed those worries and "not only successfully married these two opposites but harmonized them into something greater than either singular discipline's perspective could accomplish on its own."

Lau's research focuses on the Kowloon Walled City not simply as a historical site, but as a case study in how digital technology constructs-and possibly distorts or "flattens"-history, a trend that could accelerate with AI.

"As AI becomes the primary way people encounter historical information because of ease of access, the curatorial choices built into these systems will harden into defaults that become harder to challenge over time," Lau said.

Guo Jue agreed that Lau's project is not only innovative and ambitious, but timely. "As AI rapidly integrates into the fabric of our lives-including the digital tools we increasingly rely on to access, analyze, and understand the past-humanists, especially historians, are rightfully concerned. Technology is not neutral, nor is history."