The Historian as Transnational Agent

The past two decades have witnessed profound changes in the historian’s craft. Twenty-first century technology has become inextricably allied to historical research. Digital archives and full-text searchable databases have made possible novel research practices, which Lara Putnam named “side-glancing” and “borderless term-searching.” They enable the historian to glance across the boundaries of conventional place-based expertise, apparently liberating her from a world in which nation-states continue to exercise the greatest responsibility for—and dominance over—the creation of archives. In this way, as Putnam writes, the digital has become the “unacknowledged handmaiden of transnational history.”1 Digital archives in themselves, however, do not necessarily support the transnational turn or contest methodological nationalism in historical research. They may offer new methodological possibilities, but the historian remains the agent of transnationalism. Key to this is an appreciation of the complex relationship between language, history and digitization. Historians’ reliance on monolingual, frequently Anglophone archives to write transnational histories has already been amply criticized for imposing a new hegemony: British imperial history in disguise, or the domination of “Anglo-Saxon schools of thought.”2 Though English still remains the lingua franca for transnational histories, the breathtaking growth of Chinese digitization efforts in the last two decades is often used as evidence to show that the landscape is shifting—witness, for instance, the enormous efforts behind the creation of the Qing History Project database and the promise of over twenty million files from Qing dynasty records made available for “borderless term-searching.”3 But are digitized Chinese-language archives the panacea they appear? In the case of Chinese-language newspapers, their digitization has often aided methodological nationalism by reinforcing the national framing implicit in what counts as a “Chinese” newspaper—a feature that is far from the promise of aiding transnational history. Still, this strengthens the case for the historian, rather than the digital archives she uses, remaining the true handmaiden of transnational history. A critical reading of the intersection between the “Sinophone” and the digital articulates this point. The concept of the “Sinophone” has animated many scholarly debates over the past decade, and its development illustrates how the field of China studies is being pressed to reckon with its deep-rooted methodological nationalism. Grounded in language and literary criticism as their principal methodology, Shih Shu-mei and others advocate for readings of “Sinitic-language communities and cultures outside China as well as ethnic minority communities and cultures within China where Mandarin is adopted or imposed.”4 Scholars of Sinophone studies more wary of Shih’s framing of the Sinophone as a category defined by “non-relation with China,” such as David Der-wei Wang, have argued critically for the inclusion of mainland, Han Chinese writers into the remit of Sinophone studies.5 Despite their differences regarding the criteria of inclusion and exclusion in the concept of “Sinophone,” though, they share the critical stance of antihegemonic Chineseness and China-centrism. The term “Sinitic” also possesses similar critical potential. In his study of the vernacularization of literary Chinese (wenyan) in East Asia, Peter Kornicki argued against associating wenyan or so-called Sinitic texts exclusively with China or Chinese, noting that such texts can be produced outside the political entity now known as China, never reaching readers of Chinese languages and being instead “articulated in conformity with Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese phonology.”6 “Sinophone” and “Sinitic” are not fancy synonyms for “Chinese,” but invitations to critical reflections on Chineseness and Sinocentrism. In the case of digitization, these distinctions are more than merely academic. Long before the rise of Sinophone studies and mass digitization of historical newspapers, historians of the Chinese press were already engaged in critiques of methodological nationalism, pointing out the transnational dimensions of the Chinese press and the multiplicity of identities—local, national, transnational—that newspapers might invoke.7 The use of terms like “Sinophone” and “Sinitic” mounts a further challenge to the default national framing for what counts as a “Chinese” newspaper. But the digitization of historical “Chinese” newspapers has not been reliably shaped by either these or the Sinophone debates. Nation-states still remain the most convenient and frequently used units for measuring the progress and impact of digitization of historical sources. In a 2016 report from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), titled A New Age of Culture and commissioned by Google, data was collected from 243 arts and heritage institutions in 22 countries to measure advances in digitization under five broad categories, including website assessment, social media presence, interactive experience capacity, digital access to archives, and digital education initiatives.8 In focusing primarily on national institutions (museums, heritage sites, performing arts theaters, and archives) and nation-state units, however, the EIU report simplifies the complexity of the process of digitization and overlooks non-national efforts to digitize historical material. For all its critical potential, however, the Sinophone’s focus on language as the principal vector of what counts as “Chinese” is not without shortcomings, and this has further implications for digitization of Chinese newspapers. Far more work needs to be done to challenge and extend the Sinophone beyond its dominant characterization as a primarily Sinitic phenomenon.9 For instance, key historical experiences of ethnic Chinese in Malaysia and Indonesia have taken place not only in Sinitic forms (putonghua, or regionally specific fangyan) but also in varieties of Malay, Arabic, and English; in acts of creolization or codeswitching; and in the lived experience of radical, everyday polyglossia.10 So, would-be Chinese newspapers might include newspapers published in standard Sinitic forms, such as the well-researched Shanghai-based newspaper Shenbao appearing alongside tabloid newspapers published in early twentieth-century colonial Singapore, whose authors wrote prose inflected with other Sinitic languages (Cantonese or Hokkien colloquial slang, for example). But what makes a newspaper “Sinophone” beyond its Sinitic script? Is a Sino-Malay newspaper in romanized Malay—such as Sin Po published in the Dutch East Indies in the early twentieth century, or the Malay-language Kabar Slalu published by the Straits Chinese community in Singapore—Sinophone? What about papers produced by Chinese communities in non-Sinitic languages, such as the English-language Chinatown News published in 1950s Vancouver? While the concept of “Sinophone” struggles to effectively include non-Sinitic languages within its remit, it is nonetheless preferable to “Chinese,” since it raises questions about language-determined identities and place-based cultural practices and—even if answers to such questions differ—also helps caution against the conflation of language, ethnicity, and national identity in efforts to digitize “Chinese” newspapers. As a further challenge to the monopoly of the nation-state on digitization, and contra the EIU report, a variety of national and non-national actors have been instrumental in advancing the digitization of Sinophone newspapers. Different levels of national institutions both inside and outside China, such as national, provincial, and municipal libraries, have been actively digitizing collections of historical Sinophone newspapers in ways that are difficult to measure in nation-state terms. Some, such as NewspaperSG, the online archive built by the National Library Board of Singapore, are largely open access. The National University of Singapore (NUS) Digital Gems collection, consisting of around five hundred Sinitic-language newspapers and periodicals published in Southeast Asia between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century, are also freely available. Some major paywalled platforms such as Shanghai Library’s Index to Chinese Newspapers and Periodicals (Quanguo baokan suoyin, CNBKSY) are products of provincial or municipal initiatives in China. In the past decade, two bilingual databases, Chinese Women’s Magazines in the Late Qing and Early Republic (WoMag) and Early Chinese Periodicals Online (ECPO), have been developed as a collaborative project between members of Academia Sinica, in Taiwan, and Heidelberg University.11 If we include non-Sinitic languages within our understanding of Sinophone newspapers, then we can note that Leiden University’s Malay and Sino-Malay popular fiction (KITLV) collection has digitized around 1,400 books and two newspapers (Sin Po and Hoakiao) published by communities of Chinese descent in Indonesia between the 1870s and the 1950s. Commercial agencies across the globe are another set of important players in digitizing Sinophone newspapers and provide a few highly sophisticated, full-text searchable databases, such as Greenapple Changsha’s widely used Shenbao newspaper database. Though these commercial enterprises often guard their offerings behind paywalls, a handful occasionally transition into open access resources: the Late Qing and Republican-era Chinese Newspapers collection from East View Information Services was made open access through philanthropic largesse.12 Commercial databases, unsurprisingly, offer better searchable texts. While full pages of Shenbao are available for users to view and download free of charge on the Internet Archive, they are available only in non-searchable format. The complexity of the layout of early Chinese newspapers, the juxtaposition of texts and images, and the specific features of non-Latin scripts make optical character recognition (OCR) and other forms of automatic processing extremely difficult.13 Commercial agencies such as Greenapple Changsha use labor- and cost-intensive double-keying methods in digitizing their newspapers, with which they justify their often eye-watering subscription costs, which can be as high as US$300,000 per year, and raise ongoing questions about global institutional equity with regard to digital access.14 Indeed, precisely because of growing global chasms between the digital haves and have-nots, peer-to-peer interfaces have also burgeoned, helping to facilitate what we may term a “guerrilla” consumption and exchange of digitized Sinophone newspapers and media content on independent nonprofit platforms. These range from Z-Library and Shuge (Fig. 4) to the now-defunct Jiwen Books and other netizen initiatives on social media, all of which freely exchange and share digitized historical Chinese-language newspapers, resources supporting niche heritage interests (particularly in the realm of fangyan or “topolect” cultural productions), and personal primary source collections.15 These community digitization efforts constitute another important part of the landscape of digitized Sinophone materials that go largely uncaptured by nation-state frameworks. In the wake of this proliferation of Sinitic language material in the digital universe, a great deal of energy has been poured into improving OCR for non-Latin scripts, including finding new algorithms for detecting patterns in the newspapers, manual image preprocessing steps, and crowdsourcing material.16 But to return to our musings about the Sinophone: legibility is not just a technical challenge. Shuge.org’s enthusiastic claim that “everyone is free to view our civilization” assumes a readership universally literate in standardized Sinitic script, for instance. But even searchable full-text databases create the problem of legibility in terms of literacy in nonstandard Sinitic variants. Cantonese-inflected tabloids in early twentieth-century Singapore furnish one such example. Digital databases are not always sensitive to such nuances: in NUS’s Digital Gems database, Cantonese-inflected tabloids such as Kaixin (the Happy Times) are simply categorized under the “Chinese newspapers” collection, therefore eliding the critical issue of language and identity raised by the coexistence of written Mandarin and written Cantonese in these papers. Thanks to the exceptional efforts of digitization by Singapore government agencies, everyone is free to view them—but not everyone is free to understand them. And none of these technical solutions mitigate against the practical illegibility of Arabic, Vietnamese, Malay, or Indonesian newspapers and their exclusion from the methodologically nationalist framing of “Chinese” newspapers, even though they contain important insights into truly transnational histories of Sinophone communities in Southeast Asia. The historian remains the agent, responsible for “travelling” across databases and languages alike, in pursuit of their transnational ambitions. Regardless of the evident synergies between digital methods and transnational history, historians who wish to challenge methodological nationalism do still need to travel between different digital archives—often those oriented around the nation-state—to write transnational or global histories. In this regard, digital archives of Sinophone newspapers are not unlike physical archives. They remind us constantly of the shortfalls of both resources in straining against the weight of the nation-state. Just as with physical archives, various barriers continue to prevent the historical agent from taking full advantage of digital archives. Some remain behind paywalls; some require additional linguistic skills and cultural knowledge. Serendipity still matters, and, more so, the agency of the historian still matters in asking transnational questions. Digitized newspapers assist rather than dictate research directions: they furnish the raw material, but it remains the job of the historian to interpret them and, for instance, to triangulate between Shanghai’s Shenbao and Singapore’s Nanyang Siang Pau, or to make Sinitic newspapers visible in marginal, non-national places and read them at scale.17 Screenshot of Shuge.org. The website caption reads: “Thanks to the open internet, everyone is free to view our civilization.” “Sinophone newspapers” are an exemplary case for the continuing role of the historian in the digital age, and there are no newspaper and periodical databases that self-describe as “Sinophone.” Yet by deliberately using the term “Sinophone” rather than “Chinese” to discuss existing digitized Sinitic-language newspapers, we invite readers to think about the diversity of Sinitic languages, the often conflated distinctions between language, ethnicity, and national identity, and how digitization continues to elide rather than confront such issues. Yushu Geng is a Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU Shanghai. Her research and writing focus on gender, childhood, and print culture in the Sinophone world in the twentieth century. Her book-in-progress explores the circulation and regulation of Chinese-language obscene publications in Republican Shanghai and colonial Singapore. Rachel Leow is an Associate Professor in Modern East Asian history at the University of Cambridge. Her first book, Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia (Cambridge University Press, 2016), dwelt on issues of knowledge production, language, ethnicity, and race making among Malay and Chinese communities in colonial and postcolonial Malaysia. Her new research seeks to outline a critical social and intellectual history of Chinese communities in Southeast Asia; recent articles have been published in Twentieth-Century China and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.

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