GitHub as a collaborative curation platform for memory projects of COVID-19 in China

Han, Eileen Le

doi:10.1080/1369118x.2022.2161828

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…The circulation of WeChat articles, in return, encouraged more users to visit Li's Weibo homepage and join the commemoration. Together, these two platforms helped stabilize internet users' memory of Li as a whistleblower, a civilian hero, a martyr, and a supporter of free speech and diverse voices, distinguished from the official version (Han, 2023).…”

Section: Preliminary Findings and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Commemorating as Criticizing: How Li Wenliang’s Weibo Homepage Becomes a Place for Questioning China’s Covid-19 Policies and a “Wailing Wall”

Lin

2023

SPIR

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Li Wenliang, an eye doctor at Wuhan Central hospital and one of the first to raise alarm about the outbreak of COVID-19, was summoned by the local police and forced to sign a statement reprimanding his message as a groundless rumor as well as a disturbance to the public order in late December 2019. Two months later, Li died after contracting COVID-19 at his workplace, aged 33 years. This caused shock and outrage across China and Li’s Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter) homepage soon became an online “wailing wall,” where people mourned, condoled, and commemorated the whistleblower and complained, questioned, and protested the overstrict government policies relevant to COVID-19 pandemic. This study shows that Weibo offers a place for users to see the mundane life of Li Wenliang, express grief and frustration, and interact with each other to remember Li, whereas another super-powerful Chinese social media, WeChat, allows users to synthesize information about Li, provide analysis and criticism, and circulate the memory of Li through their social networks. Together, these two platforms helped stabilize Chinese internet users’ memory of Li as a whistleblower, a civilian hero, a martyr, and a supporter of free speech and diverse voices, distinguished from the official version. This study contributes to recent scholarly interest in understanding how the technological affordances of social media shape memory work. It also shows that even in a politically constrictive environment, such as China’s media ecology, the space for questioning and protesting still exists, though more nuanced and precarious.

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Section: Preliminary Findings and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Commemorating as Criticizing: How Li Wenliang’s Weibo Homepage Becomes a Place for Questioning China’s Covid-19 Policies and a “Wailing Wall”

Lin

2023

SPIR

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“…For social media preservation, although researchers (Burnap et al, 2015) and ordinary individuals (Han, 2023) have also developed relatively small social media archives, as stated by Masanès (2007), memory institutions play a key role in the area of web archiving. They are most likely to achieve large-scale preservation of collective memory from social media.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

For perpetuating social media collective memory proactively and inclusively: Explore the interests and tensions of stakeholders in preservation actions

Liu,

Zhang,

Zhou

et al. 2024

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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Going beyond the limitations of technology, time, and platform lifecycles, achieving long‐term preservation of social media collective memory is an important issue. As a social action involving multiple stakeholders, social media preservation faces a complex problem space. Taking China as an example, this study revealed, from the perspective of stakeholders, the underlying logic of cultural, ethical, legal, and other issues that social media preservation encounters, namely, the tension arising from differences in stakeholders' interests and power inequalities. We specifically investigated and analyzed five categories of stakeholders and revealed six tensions among them in the power/interest matrix. In the final discussion, we analyzed what proactive and inclusive preservation actions should be. Our research not only contributes to the development of theories for social media preservation in information science but also provides clues for state regulators and memory institutions to make responsible and inclusive decisions.

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GitHub as a collaborative curation platform for memory projects of COVID-19 in China

Cited by 2 publications

References 21 publications

Commemorating as Criticizing: How Li Wenliang’s Weibo Homepage Becomes a Place for Questioning China’s Covid-19 Policies and a “Wailing Wall”

Commemorating as Criticizing: How Li Wenliang’s Weibo Homepage Becomes a Place for Questioning China’s Covid-19 Policies and a “Wailing Wall”

For perpetuating social media collective memory proactively and inclusively: Explore the interests and tensions of stakeholders in preservation actions

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