By: Latitudes
Elite network shifts during regime change; a computational approach to network analysis using Indonesian language electronic newspaper archives. (KITLV, NIOD, University of Amsterdam, Bandung Institute of Technology, Erasmus University, and DANS)
Historians have composed a large body of literature on the major Indonesian regime transitions of 1945–50 and 1998 using conventional techniques. Elite circulation is a central theme in that literature. Today, new computational techniques offer the possibility of approaching the same problem in a novel way, complementing existing knowledge and acquiring new insights.
Elite Network Shifts will extract elite names and their relationships from substantial electronic archives of news media, concentrating on the transitional events of 1945 and 1998 for which data are already in our possession. For 1945, the sources consist of recently digitized national and subnational newspapers for the period 1942–1957. For 1998, they consist of newspaper articles published on the (then new) Internet between 1994 and 2010.
The project aims to analyze formation, circulation and relocation of new and old elites in times of significant political change in the Netherlands Indies and Indonesia, by means of computational exploration of a large corpus of digitized newspapers.
