biglam/divergent-discourses-tibetan-newspapers

Divergent Discourses — Early Tibetan Newspapers, 1950–1965

523,215 text regions from early Tibetan-language newspapers published between 1950 and 1965, produced by the Divergent Discourses project (SOAS University of London and Leipzig University, with Trinity College Dublin).

This is not a flat text dump. Each row is one text region from a scanned page, retaining its reading-order position, region type, source newspaper, and issue date — so page structure survives the conversion.

Fields

• paragraph — extracted text for the region
• normalised_paragraph — normalised variant
• region_type — paragraph, heading, caption, credit, newspaper-title, …
• readingorder_idx — position of the region in the page's reading order
• paragraph_idx, filename — region and source-page identifiers
• newspaper — 3-letter code (18 titles; TID and QTN dominate)
• year, month, day, issue_date (added here: an ISO YYYY-MM-DD string), page_num

Caveats

• 14,661 rows have a null paragraph. Check normalised_paragraph or filter them out.
• page_num is a string, not an integer. Four rows carry non-numeric values (e.g. 019x). It is left as text so those rows survive intact rather than being silently nulled.
• The corpus is heavily skewed by title: TID alone accounts for 338,255 of 523,215 rows.
• Text is OCR/HTR output from historical print. Expect recognition error.

Load

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("biglam/divergent-discourses-tibetan-newspapers", split="train")

# TID is 338,255 of 523,215 rows - sample across titles if you want breadth
headings = ds.filter(lambda r: r["region_type"] == "heading" and r["paragraph"])

Source & credit

Franz Xaver Erhard et al. Divergent Discourses Corpus: E-texts of Early Tibetan Newspapers, 1950–1965. Zenodo, 2026-06-22. https://zenodo.org/records/20795805 — CC-BY-4.0.

This repository is a format conversion (CSV → Parquet). Please cite the Zenodo deposit.

@dataset{erhard_2026_divergent_discourses,
  author    = {Erhard, Franz Xaver},
  title     = {{Divergent Discourses Corpus: E-texts of Early Tibetan Newspapers, 1950--1965}},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.20795805}
}

Note: the Zenodo deposit credits Franz Xaver Erhard as sole creator. The Divergent Discourses project itself is a collaboration between SOAS University of London, Leipzig University and Trinity College Dublin.