International Ideas at UNESCO

Digital Approaches to Global Conceptual History

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The transnational exchange of ideas is a central aspect of globalization, but historians have struggled to find approaches that deal adequately with the international character of modern intellectual life. In this project, which ran from 2020 to 2024, we explored a fresh approach to this problem: using large-scale digital methods to analyze the formation, evolution, and transmission of the international ideas produced in and through international organizations. Specifically, we conducted a multi-method historical study of concepts in thousands of documents generated within UNESCO from 1945 to 2015.

The project focused on three bodies of UNESCO texts:

  1. UNESCO’s standard-setting instruments, 1945-2019
  2. UNESCO’s monthly magazine The UNESCO Courier, 1948-2020
  3. The minutes of the biannual meetings of UNESCO’s General Conference, (published as Proceedings), 1945-2019

For each of these, we pursued two goals: first, to prepare a digital text corpus that is curated, fully machine readable and as accurate as reasonably possible; second, to apply tools of digital text analysis to these corpora so as to explore our historical questions and test the value of our approach. Read more about these corpora and other project publications.

Funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), the project was led by Benjamin G. Martin (Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University) in collaboration with Fredrik Mohammadi Norén (School of Arts and Communcation, Malmö University) and systems developers at Humlab Umeå.

This project is over but work on these questions continues! Please get in touch with questions or comments.