Here’s my test blog post!

A short piece of mine, on how the INIDUN project seeks to address this question, is now up on the blog of the Uppsala University Digital Humanities network.

Thanks to Matts Lindström for the invitation to present our project there!

First, it seemed important to make some decisions about how to run the project: how would we – me (Ben Martin), my co-researcher Fredrik Norén, and the systems developers at Humlab (chiefly Roger Mähler and Andreas Marklund) – collaborate and communicate, where would data and code be kept, and so on? Trained as a decidedly non-digital historian and with my background in the American university system, collaborating with others at all has been new, to say nothing of doing so where large data sets and bespoke digital tools are involved.

The short version of what we decided is that we will be working to a high degree in and through GitHub: that is where our data and code will live, as you can see. It is where we will define our goals and chart our progress, and it is where (or rather the tool through which) we will (largely) communicate. Working in this way is new to us; tips and suggestions are most welcome!

Jekyll requires blog post files to be named according to the following format:

YEAR-MONTH-DAY-title.MARKUP

Where YEAR is a four-digit number, MONTH and DAY are both two-digit numbers, and MARKUP is the file extension representing the format used in the file. After that, include the necessary front matter. Take a look at the source for this post to get an idea about how it works.

Jekyll also offers powerful support for code snippets:

def print_hi(name)
  puts "Hi, #{name}"
end
print_hi('Tom')
#=> prints 'Hi, Tom' to STDOUT.

Check out the Jekyll docs for more info on how to get the most out of Jekyll. File all bugs/feature requests at Jekyll’s GitHub repo. If you have questions, you can ask them on Jekyll Talk.

Headings are cool

You can have many headings

Aren’t headings cool?

Seizing the moment to get busy with our INIDUN project, I presented a paper entitled “Transnational Media Histories of (or rather, through) UNESCO: An International and Digital Approach.” Here, after presenting the project over all (and trying, more or less successfully, I think, to show its relevance to the context of the symposium), I discussed the results of my recent exploration of one part of our UNESCO text corpus: the organization’s standard-setting instruments, or SSIs. These are the conventions, resolutions, and declarations that UNESCO has adopted, some 82 in all (from the 1945 constitution that founded UNESCO to the “Recommendation on Open Educational Resources” of November 2019). Assembled as a text corpus, they amount to 286,235 words. By way of preliminary exploration, I fed this corpus into the online text analysis tool Voyant, using this to identify word trends, collocates, and more.

One simple but striking finding was this: UNESCO would seem to have been an organization with a deep and long-standing concern with matters pertaining to the media. After all, UNESCO’s founding constitution explains that, to realize its purpose, the organization will “Collaborate in the work of advancing the mutual knowledge and understanding of peoples, through all means of mass communication and to that end recommend such international agreements as may be necessary to promote the free flow of ideas by word and image.”

So, how often have “media” in fact been an explicit focus of UNESCO’s SSIs? As you can see, not often at all.

With one major exception: the spike in the middle is the Mass Media Declaration (actually called the Declaration on Fundamental Principles concerning the Contribution of the Mass Media to Strengthening Peace and International Understanding, to the Promotion of Human Rights and to Countering Racialism, Apartheid and Incitement to War) adopted by UNESCO’s General Conference in November 1978.

Scholars are aware of this Declaration, of course, and it’s no surprise to find a spike in that word’s use at that point. But for us, this is interesting: it seemed reasonable to think that “media” was a natural field for UNESCO, yet in fact there was, apparently, only one moment in UNESCO’s history when media was a major issue — or, at least, an issue major enough to lead to the adoption of an SSI. It is striking, too, that “media” was not a significant term before or after that date. (The later small spike is a 2015 declaration on sports, that invites “the media,” among other social forces, to promote the value of physical education and exercise.)

We know that the Mass Media Declaration reflected the ideas and goals of the controversial effort to create a “New World Information and Communications Order” – an effort that led the USA and UK to withdraw from UNESCO altogether. Could it be that what we see in this graph is a story: in which an effort to pull the media to the heart of UNESCO’s concerns was followed by silence on that issue when the effort was defeated?

Stay tuned…!