Blogged by Asiapundit

It's a good feeling the first time you realize someone actually finds value in your blog. I had that feeling earlier this evening when I happened upon Asiapundit's reference to my earlier post about my preliminary test run of Xinhua on references to Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s.

That prompted me to post the raw data in PDF format to my Harvard website. Creating the PDF was easy (with a Mac); uploading it to the FAS web server was unbelievably complicated. Besides basic HTML skills, Harvard requires you to know unix commands, and be able to work with a secure FTP client. Very few students -- Extension or otherwise -- happen to be able to do this. It's almost as if FAS doesn't want you to create a website ... now why would that be?

Anyhow, here's a link to my Harvard website, which has a link to the preliminary Xinhua data on Taiwan. It's very rough ... note there are no totals for each year, meaning relative frequency is impossible to figure out. But in an earlier study, I found that Xinhua's English language wire service was publishing about 20,000 news items per year in 1978 and 1979 (compared to about 15000 in 1977, the first year in which Xinhua English service items were archived in LexisNexis), so I imagine the totals would be similar for the early 1980s.