Histoire de l’Asie orientale contemporaine : sources, méthodes, objets
The seminar is intended to stimulate discussion based on current research in the history of contemporary East Asia (China, Koreas, Japan, Taiwan, etc.), by highlighting the issues specific to the collection and treatment of the sources of this region: access to documentation, constitution of corpora, multilingual skills. Emphasis is also placed on the variety of regional, transnational, connected, circulatory or comparative approaches, made necessary by the historiographic turn of the last three decades, giving a central place to imperial and post-imperial history. Finally, faced with the growing difficulties of access to certain sites, the seminar will focus on identifying new or revisited sources, in the light of research methods that renew their exploration.

Each session is built around the presentation of an original corpus of sources (public and private, handwritten and printed, literary, oral, iconographic and audiovisual, material and digitized) and a discussion of the methodological and historiographical problems that its use and exploitation for research entail.

On 14 December, Christian Henriot presented his own experience and practice of the Shenbao, a Shanghai-based newspaper that he has been using for four decades as a historical source under various formats, through various instruments, and on various research topics. He exposed his most recent exploration of the Shenbao as a digital corpus with digital methodologies borrowed from natural language processing and computing, as well as digital tools developed in the ENP- China project.