Adam Smith's core areas of interest concern the beginnings and early development of literacy in China, from the period of the earliest written records around 1300 BCE, through to the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE) when textual scholars effectively standardized both the script and the body of earlier received literature that has come down to us through their hands. He is interested in institutions for scribal education, linguistic reconstruction of Old Chinese, textual transmission, and the ongoing challenge of deciphering texts in difficult early orthographies that have become available in vast quantities through archeological excavation.

Smith's DH project involves developing a database and user interface for transcribing and analyzing Chinese inscriptions in early orthographies for which no standard system of text encoding is available. This involves using custom fonts for text display, and linking encoded text to digital images of the original inscriptions.