Concepts in Contexts: Discourse-based Semantic Networks of Ideologies in Taiwan (1945–1949)

This article examines the semantic development of significant keywords in Taiwanese cultural discourse from a corpus-based inductive perspective. It contextualises these keywords ideologically and socially via extended network analysis and innovatively also via sociological analysis. The research investigated lexical patterns in what we refer to as the Taiwan Early Post-war Corpus, which consists of culturally oriented articles from 1945 to 1949. It treated shared ideologically loaded keywords as indicators of different ideologies which in turn identify the social groups who propagate them. Through this process we discovered three ideologically inclined semantic fields, which emphasise connections to the dominant cultural discourses of the central and local governments, as well as one that emphasises Taiwanese subjectivity. To understand their contemporaneous dynamics, the study examined networks associated with the authors and periodicals through shared keywords. Using the Taiwan Biographical Ontology, the study complemented ideological patterns with positional analyses of authors’ social involvements, which allowed us to treat them as proxies for various types of social, cultural, economic and political capital. We could thus characterise the habitus of each cluster and its position on an ideological map, thereby creating multi-layered networks of concepts, ideologies and social patterns.