Ruoyiyi Li L&S Social Sciences
Digitizing Dissent: Berkeley-Berlin Radical Networks
In 1968, a global left-wing revolution ignited all over the world. Young students holding the flags of revolution stood at the frontier of this global upheaval. How and why did these revolutions happen simultaneously and similarly? I argue that a transnational information network of student movements existed behind these events. In this project, I focus on how specific protest tactics and revolutionary terms transformed as they moved between two key hubs: Berkeley and West Berlin. To reconstruct this revolutionary information network, I will research the underground publications of student organizations in both cities as my core sources. Using digital humanities and text analysis tools, I will extract and track specific terms within vast archives of revolutionary prints to analyze how they were borrowed across borders and how their meanings shifted during transmission. This research breaks away from elite-centric perspectives on the 1960s revolutionary era and utilizes digital analysis to perform large-scale material analysis impossible for traditional methods, offering a new perspective for understanding left-wing revolutions.
Message To Sponsor
Thank you so much for your generous support of my research. I am incredibly excited to combine traditional historical research with digital text analysis to uncover the hidden transnational networks behind 1960s students movements. I am deeply grateful for this opportunity and look forward to sharing my findings with you at the end of the program.