At http://www.cesd-thai.info you can now download newspaper articles as well as pictures related to ethnic groups in Southeast Asia. The website also contains references to academic articles, an e-museum as well as conference and workshops announcements.

This database is the result of a 4-year collaboration between the Center of Ethnic Studies and Development (CESD), a research group of the Social Research Institute, Chiang Mai University, and the Institute of Research for Development (IRD, France). The website is conceived as a tool for researchers and students who are interested in the contemporary history of ethnicity in this region.

The newspapers database contains 12,750 newspaper articles in English and/or Thai language covering the period from 1965 to the present. New articles are regularly added. Most articles are available in pdf format. More recent articles are available in html format.

The 5,072 articles in English language from 1965 to 2008 are extracted mainly from the Bangkok Post, Chiang Mai Mail, The Nation, Vientiane Times and Irrawaddy. One set (1965 to 1990) comes from the archives of the former Tribal Research Institute (TRI), the others (1990 to present) come from CESD archives.

The 7,676 articles in Thai language (1965-2008 or 2508-2551) are extracted from various newspapers:

  • Khon Muang, Siamrath, Thairath, Thin Nue, Daily News, Daily Mail for the articles of the TRI archive (1965-1990).
  • Chiangmai News, Thai News, Matichon, Thairath for the articles of the CESD archive (1990-2008).

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 from the TRI archives are available for download. The articles in English from the CESD archives are also progressively being scanned and put online. The whole set will be available by mid-February 2009, including the articles extracted from the Vientiane Times 2003-2008.

About 30% of the articles in Thai are also currently available on-line in pdf format. The whole set of articles in Thai will be online by the end of March 2009.

Search can be done by newspaper name, by title, by date and by keywords. Articles in English have been indexed only with English keywords and articles in Thai only with Thai keywords. For each article, CESD staff has selected four categories of keywords:

  • country
  • ethnic group
  • main theme
  • acronym

A complete list of keywords in English and in Thai is available by clicking on the “help” icon on the search page. The list is constantly updated.

The website also contains an NGO directory, 4,000 pictures with detailed captions (part of the private collections from Hans Mansdorff, Jacques Lemoine and Paul T. Cohen which are currently being scanned and uploaded) and a e-museum where you can download video clips on ethnic cultures.