The New Dominion

Last month, Professor Yu-Wen Chen of the University of Konstanz published a fascinating and illuminating study on a little-studied aspect of global Uyghur activism: a hyperlink analysis of websites on Uyghur issues with the intent of determining and illustrating the source of online “Uyghur issues” information and the extent of their reach. The report, published as part of a series on transnational politics by the Center for Global Studies at George Mason University is available in its entirety for free at this link. I invite anyone and everyone interested in Xinjiang and the Uyghurs to take a look at this paper for an eye-opening glimpse into the dynamics of the online sector of the Uyghur issues movement. Professor Chen has some interesting conclusions to make about Uyghur issues websites, commenting on the most common lingua franca, English, the disjoint between offline and online activism, and the notable lack of Central Asian countries among the international community of Uyghur diasporic websites.

Professor Chen’s paper came onto my radar over the usual course of scouting out interesting links and resources on Xinjiang that forms a routine part of my research week. I was in no way expecting to find that our website, The New Dominion, occupies a seemingly significant node in the graphical depiction of “Uyghur Issue Networks” Professor Chen has produced on page 7 of the paper (that is, if I’m interpreting the image correctly.)

It may be a little hard to read the labels, as the original image was already a tad blurry. The New Dominion is depicted on this network as the highest yellow node near the upper left.

How was this network made? Professor Chen used propriety software called Issue Crawler which takes an initial set of websites then follows outbound links to a certain degree of iterations. For those with a better grasp of the lingo (this excludes me):

IssueCrawler harvests the URLs, capturing the starting points’ outlinks and returning embedded co-linked sites. The net result is the generation of a binary matrix of the site relationships. As differing linkages between sites results in constantly changing configurations, Figure 2 [the graph above - P] is a graphic visualization of the Uyghur online networks on January 3, 2010, with some additional retrieved relationships.

The dataset itself is also available for anyone who wants to take a closer look… and also owns the propriety network analysis software UCINET. Again, that would exclude me, though I may download the 60-day trial version and take Professor Chen’s data for a spin.

What does this mean? Well, the Uyghur American Association, which was one of the “seed sites” from which the analysis was started, links frequently to our analysis and translations. I’ve gotten an only vague sense of this: I believe members of the UAA forums post links to our articles, rather than the site frontpage itself. In turn, we link to a host of websites from which we draw material and cite sources. In no particular order, we’ve apparently made links to these sites: the United Nations, UighurLanguage.com, Eurasianet, Fool’s Mountain, the China Beat, Uyghurblog, Duihua, the Wall Street Journal, Uighurbiz, Danwei, Far West China, and the  China Digital Times. Obviously, over the course of our existence we’ve linked to tons of websites and unfortunately I don’t know what exactly makes IssueCrawler decide to depict a linkage. Nevertheless, we do try to be pretty thorough when it comes to citing sources and bringing in perspectives, and so I’m glad to see that the IssueCrawler robot can see our meticulousness and depict our octopus-like linkages accordingly.

And so, The New Dominion is a central node in the “Uyghur Issues Network.” This does have some implications. I must stress and stress again that my views (or outbound links) in no way represent the views or opinions of TND’s other more scholarly and cool-headed writer Tewpiq. Nevertheless, over the years, with my experiences in Xinjiang and as a writer at this blog, I’ve come to embrace the fact that there has been a more “activist-y” tone to my writings. I’ve tried to explore the shifts in my perspectives and I cannot but conclude that a just use of my (very limited) language abilities and familiarity with regional issues would be to help Uyghurs have another forum where their culture can be discussed, be it in a historical manner, a cultural manner, an travel-guide style way, and yes, prominently, in a political fashion. I can only hope that our site will continue to draw from a variety of sources to produce content useful to readers, activists, and random visitors alike.