Bringing the Past Alive: Artificial Intelligence as a Knowledge Medium for Cultural Heritage Engagement

This paper explores how artificial intelligence is transforming engagement with cultural heritage from static preservation toward interactive knowledge production. Drawing on media-historical perspectives, it proposes the concept of knowledge liberation to interpret successive stages in the evolution of knowledge environments, from oral transmission and print culture to digital networks and AI-mediated interaction. Within this framework, cultural knowledge becomes progressively less constrained by the material conditions of its transmission. The paper examines several AI-enabled platforms developed at Peking University that support large-scale digitisation, structured data extraction, knowledge-graph construction, and multimodal cultural content generation. It argues that AI is emerging as a new knowledge medium that reshapes research methodologies, expands modes of cultural representation, and strengthens connections between humanities scholarship and public knowledge production.