Divergent Discourses: Processes of Narrative Construction in Tibet, 1955-62

“分歧的话语”项目是一个国际性的、英德合作的研究项目，研究一场始于上世纪50年代喜马拉雅山的冲突，并导致了近20年的武装冲突。​作为回应，中国官员制作了数百万字的报纸、历史小册子、宣传传单和书籍，以证明他们对西藏的主权，并谴责旧政权。这类材料在很大程度上是有争议的，通常不被视为历史学家的主要资料来源。但是，数字人文学科和计算研究技术的发展意味着，现在可以通过多种方式对它们进行挖掘，以提取有关事件、个人和思想的细节，否则这些细节在文本中几乎不会被注意到。有了这些新的研究工具，无数的数据和信息可以从多个来源汇集在一起，揭示新的信息，并为时代的历史提供新的见解。这些创新的工具使我们能够深入研究20世纪50年代出现的两种相互竞争的话语，每种话语都有自己对西藏历史、身份和传统的描述。该项目将由莱比锡的一位现代西藏文学专家和一位现代西藏历史学家与伦敦的一位历史语言学家共同领导，将从莱比锡、柏林、牛津、布拉格和其他地方的图书馆收集几乎完全被忽视的文件，包括20世纪50年代的宣传材料和报纸。通过改造现有的软件工具，该项目将开发计算工具，使现代藏文文献第一次有可能被汇编成一个数字语料库，在那里它们可以被注释和交叉引用，以便进行复杂的搜索和研究。这个为期三年的项目将带来一些新的见解，包括导致中国和西藏政府在20世纪50年代分裂的事件，他们产生的争论和叙述，以及这种分裂如何改变后来的事件。该项目还将创建一个网站，其中包含该时期的典型文件示例，并提供英文翻译，从文件中提取的事件和姓名数据库，以及在线访问该项目收集的文本和数据。

The Divergent Discourses project is an international, collaborative UK-German research study of a conflict that began in the high Himalayas in the 1950s and led to nearly two decades of armed conflict. That conflict continues today in the form of disputes over ideas and narratives between the Chinese government and the exile Tibetan community, together with recurrent unrest and protests within Tibet and protracted border tensions between China and its neighbours. Not long after Chairman Mao sent Chinese troops to annexe Tibet in 1950, the Dalai Lama, the traditional ruler of Tibet, fled with some 80,000 Tibetans to India. In response, Chinese officials produced millions of words in newsprint, historical tracts, propaganda leaflets and books to justify their claim to Tibet and condemn the old regime. From India, exile Tibetans produced refugee accounts, testimonies, memoirs, and histories of Tibet to counter China's claims. Materials of this kind, which are in large part polemical, are not often treated as major sources for historians. But the development of digital humanities and computational research techniques means that they can now be mined in numerous ways to extract details about events, individuals and ideas that would otherwise be little noticed in the texts within which they are buried. With these new research tools, innumerable pieces of data and information can be brought together from multiple sources, revealing new information and offering new insights into the history of the time. These innovative tools allow close study of the two competing discourses that emerged in the 1950s, each with their own account of Tibetan history, identity, and traditions. The divergence between these accounts has since shaped China's policies in Tibet, its tense relations with India, its strained relations with the US and the West, its response to recurrent protests by Tibetans within Tibet, and the six-decades-long failure of the exile and Chinese leaderships to reach a settlement. The project, which will be led jointly by an expert in modern Tibetan literature in Leipzig and a modern Tibetan historian working with a historical linguist in London, will collect almost entirely overlooked documents from libraries in Leipzig, Berlin, Oxford, Prague and elsewhere, including propaganda materials and newspapers from the 1950s. By adapting existing software tools, the project will develop computational tools that will make it possible for the first time for modern Tibetan texts to be compiled into a digital corpus of historical materials, where they can be annotated and cross-referenced to allow sophisticated searches and study. The three-year project will lead to publications with new insights about the events that led to the split between the Chinese and Tibetan governments in the 1950s, about the arguments and narratives that they produced, and about the ways in which this cleavage changed subsequent events. The project will also create a website with examples of typical documents from the period with English translations, a database of events and names extracted from the documents, and online access to the texts and data collected by the project.