Interview Yi-Tang Lin
Christine: May I just ask you to introduce yourself? What position do you hold at the Department of History? What are your research interests and teaching activities?
Yi-Tang: Hello everyone, and thank you so much, Christine, for having me. My name is Yi-Tang Lin. I am an SNSF assistant professor in the Department of History at UZH. I lead a five-year project titled Rice Knowledge and Practices between Pacific Asia and West Africa: International Development Meets Local Farming (1960-1991). My research examines how international politics have shaped the exchange of specific branches of science and technology between East Asia and West Africa. I teach courses on topics such as science, technology, food and agriculture, China, and an upcoming method-focused class on digital history.
Christine: Many thanks. As far as I know, you seem to focus on using different approaches like multi-archival methods such as oral history and database analysis. Maybe you can also say a few words on that?
Yi-Tang: I'm a method junkie (laughs). I indeed work with all these approaches to capture materials and voices of different natures. Farmers in Sierra Leone, for instance, do not share the culture of preserving written records. Talking with them, however, provided essential knowledge about their experiences working with Chinese farmers during the Cold War, which were often overlooked in archival materials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as the latter tended to present idealized images of their missions in West Africa.
Christine: True story! May I now ask you to present one of your bigger projects, the “Rockefeller fellows” – what is it about, what are the specifics and the technical background of it? Maybe you can outline the database you've set up with your colleagues?
Yi-Tang: Rockefeller fellows as heralds of globalization: the circulation of elites, knowledge and practices of modernization, 1920s -1970s was an SNSF project between 2018 and 2022, with four PIs, a postdoc (me), three PhD students and a data engineer. Between 1914 to the 1970s, the Rockefeller Foundation granted 15,000 individual grants for experts from 88 different countries and territories. The fields ranged from mathematics and chemistry to history and arts. The fellowships enabled grantees to travel to other countries for training, ranging from a few months to three years, before returning to their home countries to serve.
Our database uses the fellowship recorder cards as its core source materials. Conserved at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Tarrytown, New York, each index card documents a fellow's trajectories before and after the fellowship. We cross-referenced our findings with those of the Rockefeller Foundation's other publications and archival materials.
We designed the relational database using FileMaker. Although it is not the most open infrastructure, FileMaker is quite straightforward for users like us. With the help of our engineer, we successfully integrated fellowship index cards as we transcribed the information. We then spent another year standardizing the inserted information. Spanned between 1914 and 1970, covering territories in different regions, we had to make decisions about our standardization strategies. All the strategies were aligned to our research question. For instance, as the imperial networks were crucial to our analysis, we decided to name the colonial territories with the adjective of the colonizing power (ex., Japanese Taiwan instead of Taiwan). In our drop-down menu, all Japanese colonies would then be listed one after another.
Christine: What makes this project special?
Yi-Tang: Of a global scale, the Rockefeller fellowship program systematically distributed specific ways of knowing and governing across the world in the 20th century. Some groups of fellows and their contributions in changing science and governance were well-known among historians. For instance, China's public health fellows’ work in the interwar period, agronomists from the Americas and their work on high-yielding seeds, or US biologists and the rise of molecular biology. Beyond these cases, we know very little about the general impact of the fellowships.
Therefore, constructing a database based on all grantees and their trajectories is a way to shift historians' focus in two ways. First, we can see the transnational network of research institutions, as these are the individuals who are sent to many of the world's top universities, such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Paris, among others. Second, we investigate the individual mobility grants in their general terms. The database enables us to gain a systematic understanding of their trajectories after their stay abroad. As individual mobility grants remain a crucial element of current higher education strategies, our database serves as a tool to see the impact of such measures.
Christine: What difficulties and challenges did you have to face with your project and how you were you able to overcome them?
Yi-Tang: The major difficulty is that we didn't realize that there were so many fellows. There were distinct reasons leading to the fellows ' not being included in our initial estimation. Among others, many who stayed in the socialist countries were left out in the directory published in the 1970s, based on which we had our first estimation; or national governments, funded some and the Rockefeller Foundation was in charge of the arrangements.
We decided to include fellows from socialist countries to understand their importance in examining how the transnational network interacted with the Cold War political rivalry. We excluded government fellows, as the Rockefeller Foundation was not the most significant contributor. This raises the question: what kind of information should be included in the database? As we followed our research question, we documented our decisions so that we can always refer back. We had more than ten working on the database, and the document containing our decisions served as the anchor of our database-making process. Although all were trained as historians, our perspectives could be very distinct (The French speakers found missing the diacritical marks in names quite problematic, whereas others struggled to accept using UK for all three countries!).
Christine: I completely agree on this. The documentation is important in any case, as you said, particularly whilst working in a big team. However, I think that the digital methods and tools, which open up so many options, may also pose a problem for us. We need to make informed decisions and limit ourselves a bit within this “digitization hype”. Could you perhaps tell us a little more about the data, FAIR principle, reusability and interoperability.
Yi-Tang: The database is hosted in Heurist, the database solution, I would say, for the humanities. It's also published on the Yareta platform from the University of Geneva. Everyone can explore the database on our blog. The blog’s version, nonetheless, did not include individuals’ names to comply with current personal data protection regulations. We provide direct access to the full version for researchers interested in the topic, in exchange for authoring blog posts that share their findings. (Please get in touch if you are interested! )
Christine: My last question on the Rockefeller fellows: Do you use the database and your research questions around it in teaching?
Yi-Tang: Yes, I do. I teach the database methodology in two steps. First, I showed students the index card and asked them what information would be useful for the database. Interestingly, students highlighted the importance of marital status, which we did not include due to the time limit, and we were more interested in the science and knowledge network. Second, I asked students to conduct a visualization based on the database to explore what kind of narrative can emerge from the database. It is also a way to encourage students to engage with a narrative of a quantitative nature.
Christine: Coming to almost the last question: Do you want to give us an outlook on new projects in your pipeline? Because you mentioned at the beginning the rice science project.
Yi-Tang: My rice science project team constructed a database of grey literature collected from the international rice research institutes. We employ several methods to distantly read, including LLM through the H2Ogpt platform for referenced responses, to gain insight into perspectives on rice farming in West Africa from various rice research institutes. There are interesting findings: the publications of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), based in the Philippines, tended to describe rice farming in West Africa with a negative tone, compared to those of the West Africa Rice Development Association (WARDA), which was based in the region.
Christine: This is a fantastic outlook. We look forward to seeing some results in the future. Let us move to the final question: Are there any words of wisdom you would like to share with students regarding digital methods?
Yi-Tang: Digitalized materials were a tiny share. A majority of the data was either not digitized or not accessible online. I will provide a clear example now: my new research compared the IRRI in the Philippines and WARDA in West Africa. The IRRI has thousands of publications online, categorized for easy access by readers. WARDA, on the other hand, has no single historical publication uploaded. The materials, instead, were stored in stacks and gathering dust in abandoned offices in the WARDA’s headquarters in Côte d’Ivoire.
Christine: And just to add to this, that the question why something is not digitized is also really important: Sometimes there is no answer to that because time and money are lacking, but sometimes there is an answer and there are reasons why things are not digitized.
Thank you so much for the really impressive interview. I really enjoyed it and I am looking forward to keeping track of your work and projects! Thank you so much, dear Yi-Tang.
Interview from 22. September 2025