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Like many of his peers, Professor Li Yupeng grew up watching Hong Kong films and listening to Cantopop, a term used to define popular music from the city. Little did he know that his interest in Hong Kong’s pop culture would one day inspire him and his students to take on a transdisciplinary research project centring on its iconic movies and songs.

“At their peak from the 1970s to 2010s, Hong Kong cinema and pop music were cultural phenomena that dominated the local and regional market. Our team believes that presenting well-known film locations, music venues and cultural hotspots in a digital map would enable people to connect more profoundly with Hong Kong’s cinematic and musical heritage,” says Professor Li, Assistant Professor of the Department of Interactive Media under the School of Communication and Director of the AI and Social Good Lab under the AI Media Centre.

From this idea came the project “Hong Kong Pop Culture Map” (香港流行文化地圖), an ongoing transdisciplinary effort since 2022 to capture the vibrant essence of Hong Kong’s pop culture through an interactive, geospatial platform. Supported by the Digital Scholarship Grant managed by the HKBU Library, the project was recently released this year.

A transdisciplinary journey into pop culture

Adopting a multi-model that blends image, audio and text, the Hong Kong Pop Culture Map features more than 1,000 records related to hundreds of movies and songs produced between 1969 and 2024. The platform’s database allows users to search by the title of the film or song, artist name and location, and filter results by year. The users can also search the map to see the filming or song locations, learn more about these places, and view the related film quotes, scene narratives, lyrics, as well as film and song credits.

Professor Li describes the project as highly transdisciplinary, as it brings together faculty members and students from various fields including communication, artificial intelligence (AI), film, digital humanities, user experience design and science. Drawing on his expertise as a transdisciplinary scholar focusing on societal AI, he and his team employed AI for data cleaning and building a quality database using a human-in-the-loop approach from scratch.

One of the challenges in developing the project was verifying the vast amount of film and lyric data. For example, one scene of the movie Shock Wave 2 (拆彈專家2) was filmed at a commercial building, but the team found there are several buildings with the same name and therefore more efforts were dedicated to look up the precise filming location.

“The auto fact-checking process powered by AI is crucial to our project, yet it is time-consuming,” says Professor Li. “To that end, we worked with the HKBU Library team closely, and more than 20 undergraduate and postgraduate students from the School of Communication and the Faculty of Science were involved in verifying the details of data using a human-AI interaction approach in the past year.”

Preserving cinematic and musical heritage

In a labour of love, Professor Li and his team are looking into accommodating more data on the map, and he also has a list of ideas ranging from optimising the interface to adding more interactive elements that he is excited to implement.

“One of our goals in enhancing the map is to enable users to explore on their own by searching for locations related to their favourite songs or films.” By connecting the arts world to actual physical locations, he hopes that the platform can create an immersive journey for local users and evoke the shared cultural memories of the community.

In line with the concept of ‘tourism is everywhere’ introduced by the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the platform also has the potential to offer new experiences for tourists, providing them with a glimpse into Hong Kong’s vibrant pop cultural landscape.

“Working on this project has been fun and rewarding, as films and music serve as an important form of cultural heritage, and we can play a part in preserving Hong Kong’s unique stories for people across generations to experience. Our team hopes to collaborate with different partners in the future for the project and its impact to reach a wider audience,” Professor Li says.

Source: Discover HKBU