How to search our database (and what to expect)
(last update on January 2009)

a) Contents of the database

This database is the result of a collaboration between the Center of Ethnic Studies and Development (a research group of the Social Research Institute, Chiang Mai University) and the Institut of Research for Development (France).

It contains newspaper articles relevant for the study of ethnicity on Southeast Asia. Our team has currently scanned and indexed 12,750 newspaper articles in English and/or Thai language covering the period from 1965 to present. This number constantly increases by addition of new recent articles.

The 5,072 articles in English language from 1965 to 2008 are extracted mainly from Bangkok Post, Chiang Mail, The Nation and Irrawaddy. One set (1965 to 1990) comes from the archives of the Tribal Research Institute (TRI), the other (1990 to present) from our own archives.

The 7,676 articles in Thai language (1965-2008 or 2508-2551) are extracted from:
-Khon Muang, Siamrath, Thairath, Thin Nue, Daily News, Daily Mail for the articles extracted from the TRI archives.
-Chiangmai News, Thai News, Matichon, Thairath for the articles extracted from our own archives.

Most of the articles focus on Thailand and Burma but some of them also concern Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, East India, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Currently, all the articles in English coming from the TRI archives are available for download. The articles in English coming from our own archives are progressively put online as well and the whole set should be available by mid-February 2009. More or less 30% of the article in Thai language are also available on-line. The whole set of articles in Thai shall be put online by end of March 2009.

b) How to search

You can search by newspaper name, by title, by date and by keywords.

Articles in English have been indexed only with English keywords and conversely articles in Thai only with Thai keywords.

For each article, our staff selected four categories of keywords :

1. country(ies)
2. ethnic group(s)
3. main theme(s)
4. acronym(s)

You can have access to our complete list of keywords (Word format) by clicking here. Please note that this list is constantly updated.

If you want to narrow your search, you can select two or more keywords, with a single space (no comma) between them.

Once you obtained a list of articles related to you search, you can download them either in .pdf format (you will need Acrobat Reader) by clicking on the icon on the right of the page. A small amount of articles (among the most recent ones) are also available in .html format.