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

ABSTRACT

This study looks at online collaborative memory projects on GitHub, all of which started amid China’s war on the then unknown corona virus in early 2020 and curated stories from Chinese language social media, news outlets, and official websites. It finds that GitHub enables a collaborative yet centralized archiving and curation workflow, and each of the three projects present unique ways the COVID-19 memories can be preserved. Three key events – the lockdown of Wuhan, the death of the whistleblowing doctor, and the controversy over Fang Fang’s diaries – are further analyzed to show how these memory projects could form narratives that post challenge to the officially sanctioned version of the ‘correct’ collective memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective memory
• digital curation
• social media
• GitHub

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eileen Le Han

Eileen Le Han is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California San Francisco. She received her PhD in communication studying social media and collective memory in the Chinese context.