Category: Allgemein

CrossAsia Talk: From Print to Digital: Making Available Tibetan Newspapers as a Historical Source

Posted on by Xaver in Allgemein, Events, Outputs

Speaker: Franz Xaver Erhard

When: December 12, 2024 at 6 pm (CET)

Where: Online via Webex (Join now!)

The Sino-Tibetan history of the 1950s and 1960s is relatively unknown and highly contested. At the same time, sources on the period are scarce and local archives – if they exist – are generally closed to outside researchers. The few existing collections, including the one at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, of Tibetan newsprint and contemporary publications offer rare insights into the events but also the official presentation of events at the very time when they were taking place. The UK-German research project Divergent Discourses takes up this opportunity to study the events and narratives in newspapers of the period to understand how they became woven into cohesive yet diverging discourses on Tibet.

In the field of Tibetan Studies, Digital Humanities approaches are just emerging. Often, the essential tools are still wanted – the Divergent Discourses project has grappled with a multitude of challenges to digitisation posed by the Tibetan language and script, the complexity of newspaper layout, and the lack of Natural Language Processing tools for Tibetan and thus adapted existing or created new tools to build a workflow for the digitisation and analysis of a modern Tibetan text corpus.

The presentation will showcase the Divergent Discourses project’s approaches and Digital Humanities tools geared to unlock a large corpus of Tibetan historical newspapers for the first time as a source for a historical study of the emergence and development of conflicting concepts, ideas and discourse strategies.

The lecture will be held in English. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Crossasia team at ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de. The event will be recorded.

The lecture will also be streamed via Webex. You can participate in the lecture using your browser without installing a special software. Please click on “Join the talk now!” below, follow the link “join via browser” (“über Browser teilnehmen”), and enter your name.

Join the talk now! 

Find out more on the CrossAsia blog

Talk: Text-mining propaganda: Studying Tibetan newspapers, 1950s to early 1960s

Posted on by Xaver in Allgemein, Events, Outputs

Date 21 November 2024
Time 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm
Venue Paul Webley Wing (Senate House), SOAS University of London
Room Wolfson Lecture Theatre (SWLT)

Abstract

The 1950s and 1960s were pivotal periods both for the People’s Republic of China and on the Tibetan plateau, where major social and political change took place, including the absorption of Tibet into the new Chinese state and the flight of the Dalai Lama into exile. 

Study of events in Tibet in this period is, however, particularly difficult because archival access is heavily restricted. As a result, historians have to turn largely to propaganda materials from that time, such as the newspapers produced by either side, as primary sources for the study of that period. 

The Divergent Discourse project is trialling the use of newspapers from that time as historical sources and developing techniques for analysing their content. Working with such texts, however, presents numerous difficulties, ranging from distinguishing informational from polemical content to the challenges of digitising Tibetan language and script. In this presentation, we discuss the use of digital humanities tools to mine the corpus we have compiled of Tibetan-language newspapers produced within China and the exile Tibetan community in the 1950s and 1960s, and the prospects of discourse-tracing as a strategy for the historical study of that period.

Speakers

Dr Franz Xaver Erhard (Leipzig) is the PI of the German part of the Divergent Discourses project. He is a philologist specialising in modern Tibetan literature and early Tibetan-language newspapers. He obtained his PhD in Tibetology from Leipzig University and has taught Tibetan in Berlin, Oxford and Leipzig.

Dr Robert Barnett is the PI of the UK part of the Divergent Discourses project, funded by the AHRC. He works on nationality issues in China and modern Tibetan history, politics and culture and is a Professor and Senior Research Fellow at SOAS and an affiliate lecturer and research affiliate at King’s College London. Recent publications and edited volumes include Forceful Diplomacy (Turquoise Roof, 2024); Conflicted Memories with Benno Weiner and Françoise Robin (Brill, 2020); Tibetan Modernities: Notes from the Field with Ronald Schwartz (Brill, 2008); and Lhasa: Streets with Memories (Columbia, 2006).

Organiser

This event is co-hosted by the SOAS China Institute and the SOAS China and Inner Asia Section.

Modern-Botok. Custom dictionary for modern Tibetan

Posted on by Xaver in Allgemein, Datasets, Outputs

Tsikchen.tsv is a customised dictionary to be integrated into the Tibetan tokenizer BoTok. BoTok can tokenize classical Tibetan text or traditional genres out of the box. However, since it depends on a dictionary for tokenization, it lacks capabilities for modern Tibetan, in particular, the language of modern newspapers published in the PRC or on the subcontinent. Adding this customised dictionary adds functionality for modern Tibetan to BoTok.

Erhard, F. Xaver & Kyogoku, Yuki. (2024). Modern-Botok. Custom dictionary for modern Tibetan (v0.1) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14034747

The custom dictionary tsikchen was compiled from Christian Steinert’s collection and contains the following dictionaries:

  1. Grand Monlam Dictionary (default dictionary of Botok)
  2. Jim Valby
  3. Ives Waldo
  4. Dan Martin
  5. Tshig mdzod chen mo
  6. Dung dkar
  7. Tibetan Terminology Project

The Divergent Discourses project cleaned up and edited the resulting dictionary to the project’s requirements (removal of double entries, phraseologisms, ungrammatical entries, etc; addition of ca. 1000 personal and place names).

For its installation, see the Divergent Discourses’ modern-botok repository on github.