This paper explores the “untranslatable" dimensions of media narratives surrounding Toronto’s Chinatown demolitions from 1958–1970, leveraging AI-powered tools in digital humanities (DH) to interrogate cultural specificities and linguistic resistances in bilingual historical texts. Drawing on the conference theme, it examines how Chinese-language ethnic media (Shing Wah Daily News) and English-language mainstream outlets (Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail) constructed "self/other" boundaries, revealing elements that defy straightforward translation due to their embedded materiality—such as idiomatic expressions, cultural metaphors, and contextual nuances tied to diasporic experiences.

The primary research question is: How did bilingual media representations of Chinatown’s demolitions—for City Hall (1958–1961) and subsequent preservation campaigns (1967–1970)—construct evolving perceptions of Chinese immigrants as racialized “others,” and what do these reveal about untranslatable biases, communal identities, and shifts amid immigration reforms? Objectives include: (1) analyzing racialized framings in the 1958–1961 expropriations, where displacement intertwined with settler-colonial logics; (2) tracing post-1967 changes, including activism by Jean Lumb and the Save Chinatown Committee; and (3) uncovering how discourses negotiated “self” (resilient Chinese identity) versus “other” (expendable outsiders), with parallels to contemporary anti-Asian racism.

In the earlier period, mainstream English media framed Chinatown as an untranslatable “obstacle” to modernization, reinforcing racial hierarchies through settler narratives that erased immigrant agency. Conversely, Shing Wah’s Chinese-language coverage fostered a culturally specific “self” narrative, emphasizing solidarity and heritage in ways resistant to English equivalences. Post-1967 reforms marked tentative shifts, with community resistance introducing hybrid inclusions, yet untranslatables persisted in linguistic and material gaps between sources.

Methodologically, this digital humanities study employs qualitative content analysis of from historical newspapers, enhanced by AI-powered software for topic modeling. This appropriation of AI addresses large-scale historical analysis, streamlining theme identification and summarization.

The research bridges communication, history, and digital humanities scholarship on Asian diasporas, illuminating media’s role in contesting exclusionary narratives. By juxtaposing ethnic and mainstream voices through AI-assisted methods, it reveals ethnic media’s agency in reshaping belonging, offering insights into how past untranslatables inform ongoing identity negotiations in multicultural societies. Ultimately, this work demonstrates AI’s value in humanistic investigation.

Over 100 years after their execution, the Romanovs continue to live on in Western popular imagination through various mediums from disco tracks, cartoon films, documentaries, historical fiction novels, and social media, in spite of Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine.

Across sites such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Tumblr, fans are coming together across digital spaces to share their admiration for and knowledge of the former rulers of the Russian Empire, particularly Tsar Nicholas II and his immediate family. Younger generations on Instagram, TikTok, and Tumblr tend to favour the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia (of cartoon film fame), while Facebook groups feature a slightly older audience and are dedicated to a wider variety of subjects including jewellery and the former empress’ smile. Many content creators and Facebook group administrators take an educational tone to their posts, mimicking (perhaps subconsciously) a teacher giving a history lesson.

In today’s age of misinformation and fake news, these accounts and groups represent some audience’s only exposure to imperial Russian history. My doctoral research aims to question this continued fascination with the Romanovs, particularly amidst ongoing geopolitical tensions, interrogating whether two Russias exists – one in the present and one in historical imagination – in the minds of participants. Additionally, I seek to understand the motives of content creators and administrators for posting; if they view themselves as educating popular audiences; and questioning sources and research conducted. What does history learning on social media mean for disciplines like History and is there a role for academics to play in these dialogues?

This paper will begin by explaining why I label these accounts and groups as “fan accounts” before presenting my preliminary research from Instagram through survey results, highlighting demographic information (such as age, gender, and geographical location of the respondent), what inspires content creators, and why followers are choosing to engage with this content.

A growing body of empirical research indicates that anti-South Asian hate in Canada has risen considerably in recent years (ISD 2025; GPAHE 2024). This trend has been exacerbated by circulation of racist, anti-2SLGBTQIA+, and anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, particularly the Great Replacement conspiracy theory (GRT) (ISD 2025). Coined by French writer Renaud Camus in Le Grand Remplacement (2011), it claims that white European populations are being deliberately displaced, both ethnically and culturally, through immigration and demographic change. While originating in Europe, it has gained significant traction within North American far-right digital spaces.

Online hate directed at South Asian communities has proliferated across platforms such as 4chan, Rumble, Telegram, and Truth Social, with related narratives appearing on mainstream platforms including Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. These developments point to the normalisation of racialised conspiracy discourse within broader digital publics. According to latest data from Statistics Canada, police-reported hate crimes against South Asians increased by over 200 percent between 2019 and 2023, making them the third most targeted demographic for racial hate crimes in Canada in 2023 (Statistics Canada, 2024).

This paper examines how immigration and South Asian communities are discussed within Canadian Telegram channels, with attention to how conspiracy narratives are articulated, repeated, and amplified. We hypothesise that anti-South Asian immigration sentiment has intensified in recent years and operates at the intersection of conspiracy theories, racism and racialisation, and demographic anxiety.

We collected data from a set of Canadian Telegram groups and channels through infrastructure designed for real-time capture of multimodal content (text, images, video, and audio). Data was extracted via Telegram’s API and transformed for analysis, with Elasticsearch and Kibana dashboards supporting exploratory querying and thematic filtering. While the broader corpus spans multiple groups and channels, this paper focuses on a single case study—the Telegram channel CalgaryFreedomCentral—selected for its sustained engagement with immigration discourse and the recurrent use of conspiratorial framing.

We analysed our corpus using Voyant Tools and Spyral Notebooks. We created a targeted list of search terms related to immigration, South Asian identities, religion, and demographic threat, and applied it across the dataset to identify keyword frequency, co-occurrence patterns, and thematic clusters. We generated visualisations to identify recurrent themes and narratives linking the nexus of conspiratorial thinking, racism and population anxiety. In this presentation, we will show the Elasticsearch environment used to gather the data and how this was analysed in Voyant.

Focusing specifically on anti-Indian and anti-Sikh discourse, this paper highlights a surge in anti-South Asian racism while retaining attention to the distinct racialised and religious identities within this category. For instance, a message from the channel warns “against the rapid mass immigration invasion of Canada,” evoking fears of demographic displacement. Another stokes similar fears by claiming that “Indians are taking over Canada”. These examples from our dataset point to an anti-South Asian immigration discourse by portraying South Asian immigrants as agents of invasion and chaos in Canada. Our paper contributes methodologically and philosophically to scholarship on GRT, demonstrating how it animates anti-immigrant and anti-South Asian racism in Canada.