The History Department invites all NUS College of Humanities and Sciences, College of Design and Engineering, and School of Computing undergraduate students interested in applying computing solutions to complex textual and visual materials, to help create new research tools and methods for Singapore History!

Grouped into mixed teams of humanities, social sciences and computing students, participants will have 48 hours (28 Feb to 2 March 2026) to create technical solutions for the entire corpus of digitized British colonial archival files currently housed in the NUS Library. Organizers will provide access to a subset of the corpus and a starter pack. There will be opportunities to form teams at a pre-event mixer. Participants will develop technical solutions for handwriting OCR, searching and semantic analysis of the corpus.

The solutions will be implemented using Google Cloud. Mentorship from NUS professors and Google Cloud engineers will be available during the event. The solution will be judged by a panel and prizes will be given to the top 2 solutions ($5000 and $1000). We will judge the solution based on technical innovation (40%), historical utility (40%), interface and presentation (20%). All participants will receive a diploma crediting their contribution to Singapore History + AI. The event will take place at NUS. Food and drinks will be provided.

To apply, register your interest here by 31 Jan: https://tinyurl.com/SingaporeHistoryHackathon. For inquiries, please write to Debbie Tay at e1354727@u.nus.edu.

This event is organized by the History Department in collaboration with the Singapore History Prize, Centre for Computational Social Science and Humanities, and Google.