Tech approach gives life to artifacts

Modern tools

The digitalization of ancient animal bones and turtle shells has been undertaken by technology giant Tencent, Anyang's cultural heritage bureau, Anyang Normal University's oracle bone script information processing lab and other parties since 2022. It is part of a joint initiative to promote human-machine collaboration to aid in the deciphering and vitalization of oracle bone scripts.

At the 2024 World AI Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance in Shanghai, the digital oracle bone co-creation center, set up by Anyang Normal University, Tencent, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and several other universities and research organizations, announced the open-sourcing of the world's largest multimodal oracle bone script dataset.

This dataset includes rubbings, tracings and the positions of individual characters on more than 10,000 oracle bones, along with their corresponding contexts.

Researchers are able to use this dataset to develop algorithms for oracle bone script detection, recognition, character matching and deciphering, accelerating their digitalization and intelligent research.