探究歷史敘述之演變：運用報紙數位語料庫解讀十九至二十世紀低地國家的台灣意義建構

The status of Taiwan in international relations has been subject to much study and the island’s belonging to much change. When identity research on Taiwan became popular in the 1990s, a number of works delved into its ideological name giving. One example steering that research are the often used expressions referring to Taiwan as a renegade province in the One-China policy discourse. Following the democratization and Taiwanisation of society and politics, the ‘island’ nature of Taiwan has been gaining prominence, with designations known as Ocean Taiwan, Taiwan island history, maritime Taiwan. This research project investigates the discursive representation of Taiwan and its historical narration in newspaper corpora from the low countries. It takes Belgium as its major case study and complements with comparative data from the Netherlands and Luxemburg in tracing the ideological meaning-making of the term ‘isle’ (eiland, ile.de, Insel ) associated with geographical location Taiwan (Formose/a) in the Dutch /Flemish, French and German languages. The conceptual framework assesses the two dimensions of historical narration; a story (histoire) told by someone at a different point in time, and a discourse written for a latter-day public about interrelated events in the past. An inquiry into when, the context in which, and by what naming did Taiwan come in the news makes up the first dimension in identifying ‘isle’ as a dominant idea in the public discourse about Taiwan. The second dimension uses the researcher’s perspective exploring means to understand how the idea is constructed discursively as well as how (and if) it changed over the course of the decades. This deserves attention in view of the history; the 1895 -1945 change in belonging from Chinese province to Japanese colony, and again in 1945 back to Chinese province. Corpus data lends itself to the research area of historical narration and the study of ideology. The methodology applies traditional corpus techniques, frequency lists, concordance output and text-population keyword tagging in the designated text-population. Electronic text analysis facilitates the exploration of thematic, semantic and network relations in illustrating the type of evidence able to collect from the data and specifically in identifying items of newsworthiness. The collection and the data analysis will result in a monograph, integrating findings from two previous projects that focused on language as an expression of ideology, but interrupted due to covid-19. Limitations in view of the digital (in)accessibility from abroad, copyright and historical materials will be dealt with. The contribution of this study to the field of Taiwan Studies is twofold. First, it offers prospects and suggestions to develop a new methodology when dealing with a much larger corpus. Second, it may identify – through vocabulary- perceptions that reinforce or challenge framings about the contemporary Taiwan discourse. Brief, the manner in which the island gained its perspective in the international press of the low countries is anticipated to illuminate dynamics that to date have gone unnoticed.