by Frances Antoinette Cruz

I. The Digital Humanities

12 August 2021 – In what would arguably become his most famous monograph, Benedict Anderson put forward the idea that a main driver of the spread of nationalism was print capitalism, which allowed for the dissemination of texts in appropriate local languages across the globe (Anderson 1991). The connections between this formative period in the history of the technologically-driven dissemination of information and the ‘Digital Humanities’ may not be immediately apparent, as admittedly, the digital world of hyperlinked globalization seems a far cry from the emergence of the newspaper. But it is worth noting that technological developments have always generated seismic shifts in human understanding, society, and culture, and the advent of the computer and the internet was no exception. Despite the difficulty of a precise definition, the coining of the term Digital Humanities (DH) suggests the intersection of computing and the humanities. It can thus broadly be said to involve the analysis of human experiences and the understanding of humanity’s place in the world through computational means. Thus seen, the implications for multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration of DH are multi-faceted, and some notable examples include the digitization of text archives, the mapping of cultural or linguistic features through GIS, the study of multimedia and multimodality, distant readings through text mining, authorship attribution through stylometry, and so on.

II. Chinese Studies and the Digital Humanities

Connecting this field with Chinese Studies in the Philippines has many rich potentials, as the Digital Humanities has a broad scope of applications that encompass literature, languages and the arts. As an example of some of the projects that can be accomplished in the Digital Humanities, I’d like to take this opportunity to present the Minority Narratives project of the University of Antwerp, worked on by myself and Dr. María del Rocío Ortuño. Our project attempts to make use of available technology for digitization and analysis to investigate how minorities in the Philippines, specifically Muslims and Chinese, have been represented in historical media.

The first stage of the project involved the digitization of newspaper archives of the University of the Philippines Diliman Library, which holds samples of newspapers and various forms of Philippine print media in Spanish, English and Tagalog from the late Spanish Colonial era until the 1960s. This corpus was then classified into three distinct historical eras: The Spanish Colonial Period (until 1898), the American Colonial Period (1899 – 1946) and Independence (late 1946 – onwards). Under the related project PhilPeriodicals (sponsored by a Belgian VLIR-UOS grant in collaboration with the University of the Philippines), these historical newspapers and other print media were scanned, digitally pre-processed, and rendered into readable text formats through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to make these available to researchers and the general public.

Minority Narratives comprises of a second stage after the digitization processes of the PhilPeriodicals project. In the second stage, computer-aided text analysis (Wiedemann 2016) methods are applied on a corpus of up to 10,000 pages of digitized newspapers from the foregoing time periods. Using digital tools, target terms, such as Moro and Chinese (and their appropriate equivalents in the various languages of the newspapers) can be retrieved and plotted throughout the different time periods, revealing the frequency of their usage, their semantic context, as well as their presence or absence over time.

As the newspapers cover key transitional periods in Philippine history, it becomes possible to trace continuities and discontinuities in the way that minority groups in the Philippines were represented. Newspapers as sources may possibly enrich the understanding of minority representations alongside those in government documents and pronouncements, as newspapers were not limited to official points of view, while also not being confined to a particular viewpoint, such as in memoirs. While the framing in newspapers may highly depend upon the intended audience and political leanings of the newspaper, an increase in the volume and diversity of digitized newspapers in the corpus or dataset can aid in capturing different points of view.

An approach that involves texts across newspapers in different time periods could further determine how prevalent stereotypes of one period persisted in discourse, and to what degree minorities were seen in relation to dominant groups in society, or ‘othered’, either as strangers within a domestic sphere or as foreigners, akin to conceptual history. For instance, both Muslims and Chinese in the Philippines were given social categories, or ethno-legal categories (Chu 2021, p.3) that acted as a basis of societal organization. Sangleys (inhabitants of the colony with with Chinese heritage) and Moros (Muslims within and directly neighboring Spanish-occupied territories) were just two possibilities of a diverse array of categories that included Indios, Mestizos, Peninsulares, and Negritos. The connections between the Spanish colonial mission and the classificatory system meant that the groups at the top of the hierarchy were not only privileged politically and socially, but served as an inter-generational source of continued power and possibilities for upward mobility in the colony. Besides separating groups according to ethnic origin, the Spanish utilized social categories to separate Christianized groups from non-Christianized groups, and by doing so clearly outlined the limits of belonging to what they wished to be the dominant cultural-civilizational discourses of the colony. By comparing and contrasting collocations of words related to Moros, Muslims, Chinese and related terms with words associated with ‘Filipino’, ‘Philippines’, ‘nation’ and ‘nationhood’, we can understand the degree to which these concepts are related to each other, and contours of the aspirations and belongingness to the Philippine nation as presented in the media.

Aside from differences across time, the way minority groups are represented per language can also be considered, or, put differently, it is worth investigating if or how language choice determines how minorities are written about. Word choices, connotations, the choice of words that surround mentions of a group of people may differ from language to language not only because of the conceptual vocabulary within a language, but because of the perceived audience of the newspaper or article. In a multilingual space such as the Philippines, analyses of individual languages and aggregations of semantic contexts of conceptually similar words provide further insights into linguistic-based conceptual and discursive coherency.

It is hoped that through projects such as these, we also become more reflective about social categories created in language-specific literature, in order to not be limited by potential contexts and particular connotations. The Digital Humanities, among other things, allows us to map, understand and communicate these changes to audiences through visualizations, internet tools and open access, while retaining potentials for different fields of research, such as Chinese Studies in the Philippines.

Bibliography
Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso.
Chu, R. T. (2021). From ‘sangley’ to ‘Chinaman’, ‘Chinese Mestizo’ to ‘Tsinoy’: Unpacking ‘Chinese’ identities in the Philippines at the turn of the Twentieth-Century. Asian Ethnicity. https://doi.org/DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2021.194175
Wiedemann, G. (2016). Text Mining for Qualitative Data Analysis in the Social Sciences: A Study on Democratic Discourse in Germany. Springer VS.