Vartan Tashjian - Darberak.net

04/12/21

Vartan Tashjian, who represents Beirut’s Armenian community shares an essay contest on HyeConnect titled “The most influential Armenian of the last 300 years” with a monetary prize.

HyeConnect continues to foster creativity and encourages its users to fully utilise the rich toolkits that the platform provides based on every of the user’s interests. Vartan Tashjian from Beirut having recently joined HyeConnect has already become an active user of the platform.

Currently, Mr. Tashjian is the managing editor of the online magazine Darperag21 – an online magazine in Western Armenian, which aims to serve as a medium for modern Armenian discourse of writing, creativity, and journalism. It promotes the study of ancient and modern Armenian history and social, cultural, and educational life with a variety of approaches.

Mr. Tashjian is very passionate and supportive of any initiative towards establishing inter-Armenian relationships. Having many activities in favor of Armenians, he started using the tools of HyeConnect to present them. He learned about HyeConnect three years ago when the concept was being introduced by HC co-founders Serj Tankian and Alexis Ohanian. Later, about two months ago he was reintroduced to HyeConnect during an email communication, where diaspora issues were being discussed. He mentions that HyeConnect was regarded as the platform that could be very beneficial for solving these issues. He says that HyeConnect is a great space for Armenians to come together, discuss issues and spread their influence both on the platform and other social media as well.

Darberag21 recently announced an essay contest titled “The Most Influential Armenian of the Last 300 Years”, encouraging Armenian writers from all backgrounds to join in. Mr. Tashjian mentions the importance of endorsing critical thinking among the Armenian youth. To the question of why they chose this topic, he replies that the depiction of who an Armenian is shouldn’t be blurred, that we should clearly know the values of the collective figure of an Armenian. He adds that it is important to assess the experience we have had as a nation, to highlight all the ideas that these Armenians have introduced and how they have influenced the course of Armenian thinking and history. (To learn more about the contest you can visit https://darperag21.net/մրցոյթներ/).

To spread awareness about the contest Mr. Tashjian created a HyeConnect Event, which is being actively shared in our community. The HyeEvent tool provides all the necessary details for establishing any kind of event with its subevents on the platform. It allows for a start date and an end date, a description, a join request function, even a location. Since the event is public, people all over HyeConnect can see it and share it on their timelines.

When speaking about the Community tool Mr. Tashjian shares that communities based on common interests can be a strong foundation for the connection and network-forming among Armenians.

Mr. Tashjian is adamant about the active use of Western Armenian (WA) in diaspora communities and online. As it is known UNESCO has ranked WA among the world’s endangered languages, and Mr. Tashjian mentions that he is closely familiar with the issue. Mr. Tashjian used to manage the Armenology department in a university in Beirut for 4-5 years, and closely worked on issues concerning preservation of the Western Armenian language. That is why he thinks that the preservation of WA is paramount, especially now when we have a platform which allows for the active practice of the language. That is why Mr. Tashjian created another HyeProject titled “Western Armenian Text-To-Speech and Speech-To-Text” to contribute to the preservation of WA as it is an invaluable part of the Armenian heritage. Our platform’s carefully thought-out software tools assist in the presentation and management of the Project’s steps, missing and available resources, participants’ collaboration and other components.

“HyeConnect can bring together all the Armenian Diaspora communities, their intra-community discussions, events, competitions, projects, photo galleries and much more. It can be a solid foundation for building a network of communication between Armenians, spreading their influence beyond the platform by solving real-life issues within Armenia and the diaspora,” concludes Mr. Tashjian.

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