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

dc.contributor.author Acker, Amelia
dc.contributor.author Flamm, Lucy
dc.date.accessioned 2020-12-24T19:31:09Z
dc.date.available 2020-12-24T19:31:09Z
dc.date.issued 2021-01-05
dc.description.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.
dc.format.extent 10 pages
dc.identifier.doi 10.24251/HICSS.2021.312
dc.identifier.isbn 978-0-9981331-4-0
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10125/70926
dc.language.iso English
dc.relation.ispartof Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
dc.rights Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
dc.rights.uri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
dc.subject Critical and Ethical Studies of Digital and Social Media
dc.subject censorship
dc.subject community archives
dc.subject platforms
dc.title COVID-19 Community Archives and the Platformization of Digital Cultural Memory
prism.startingpage 2544
Files
Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
0249.pdf
Size:
588.95 KB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Description: