COVID-19 Community Archives and the Platformization of Digital Cultural Memory

Abstract

In this study we aim to understand how GitHub is used by COVID-19 interest groups for organizing community archives to protect their knowledge from the Chinese government's censorship efforts. We introduce two case studies of such COVID-19 community archives published with GitHub that appeared online in early 2020. Using public GitHub repository documentation and web archive web crawls from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, we describe how these digital community archives emerge and exist on the platform, how knowledge of them circulated on other US based social media sites and show strategies and tactics these volunteers used to keep these community archives alive, resist censorship, and guard the safety of these collections. We argue that these COVID-19 community archives are at risk because of their platform accessibility as much as the content they document, and that understanding how organizers use GitHub's platform affordances is essential to theorizing how platforms are impacting approaches to preserving cultural memory.

Platformizing the Past: The Social Media Logic of Archival Digitization

“…Studies examined platformization in fashion, gaming, and news industries (Duffy et al, 2019;Nieborg & Poell, 2018). Research in information studies engaged with the influence of platforms in archives and digital preservation (Acker & Flamm, 2021;Kriesberg & Acker, 2022), as well as how mass digitization has influenced the ways in which digital collections are now accessed (Thylstrup, 2019) and perceived by archivists (Acker & Brubaker, 2014;Lossin, 2017). In this article, we draw upon this scholarship to analyze digitization processes at the National Library of Israel, examining how Library professionals' imagination of the platform they were constructing (van Es & Poell, 2020), and how the logic of social media-namely, programmability, popularity, connectivity, and datafication ( van Dijck & Poell, 2013)-intertwine in the actual work of digitization.…”

“…Our study seeks to expand upon existing research in critical archival studies, particularly focusing on platformization. Prior studies have shed light on the significant impact of digital platforms on archival processes (Acker & Brubaker, 2014; Acker & Flamm, 2021; Kriesberg & Acker, 2022). These works demonstrate how digital platforms actively influence the ways archives preserve cultural memory, and emphasize the importance of a platform-centric approach for archivists, especially those dealing with social media.…”

The secondUSpresidential social media transition: How private platforms impact the digital preservation of public records

“…Recently, analysis of the digital landscape has employed the lens of both infrastructure and platform studies to understand how these complex technologies affect society (Gillespie, 2010; Plantin et al, 2018). The “platformization” of digital cultural memory is increasingly an area of concern for archivists, data managers, and digital preservationists because of locked‐in nature of platforms that encloses data and inhibits its access and future use (Acker & Flamm, 2021). Content created by users, hosted by platforms, and accessed (sometimes sold) to third party data brokers such as advertisers tends to create barriers for accessing data for cultural heritage, long‐term digital preservation, or not‐for‐profit scholarly access (Lynch, 2017; Milligan, 2019).…”