Tag: source materials

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.

new blog post: “Narratives, Newspapers and The Tibetan-China Dispute: The Divergent Discourses Project”

Posted on by Xaver in Publications

Since the interpretive turn in the social sciences some fifty years ago, the study of conflict, and of long-running disputes in particular, has given prominence to the role of narrative and discourse in the perpetuation of antagonisms. As Peter Coleman wrote in a much-cited essay in the 1990s, conflicts of all kinds are driven and sustained by stories: once “contradictory narratives emerge for each of the disputing groups and become promoted to unquestioned fact or truth,” he wrote, those disputes “often cross a threshold into intractability”. But how do such narratives emerge? How do they relate to the original events that triggered the dispute? And how much change do these narratives undergo in their early stages?

Divergent Discourses is a joint SOAS-Leipzig University project, funded by the UK and German research bodies (the AHRC and DFG), that aims to explore these questions by studying the earliest accounts of the Sino-Tibetan conflict. That conflict began with the entry of China’s People’s Liberation Army into Tibet 74 years ago. At that time, the two parties to the dispute immediately turned to public media – primarily to newspapers – to convey their interpretations of events. By collecting and studying newspapers from the late 1950s and early 1960s, the project aims to trace the early formation of these accounts, which evolved into the deeply divergent narratives that have sustained the conflict till today.

Read the full article by Robert Barnett and Franz Xaver Erhard on the SOAS China Institute’s blog …