I have enjoyed the weekly meetings for this fellowship. We talked about digital scholarship and the labor involved. The weekly meetings are helpful in holding us accountable and offer a space for us to talk about our progress, how we are feeling, and the issues we have encountered in our projects. I really enjoyed the recent meeting where one guest talked about the politics of digital scholarship and the pros and cons of using social media as a scholar. Academia Twitter has received a lot of attention. Many junior scholars and graduate students have used Twitter to build their public profiles and establish networks. On the other hand, institutions have used Twitter to surveil their current and potential employees. People on the lower academia ladder, such as untenured faculty, adjunct and graduate students are especially vulnerable to the consequences of this surveillance. I have heard from many junior scholars and grad students that they try to refrain from expressing their criticism of the university and/or views that the institution may deem “too radical” before they receive tenure. This phenomenon is dangerous to academic freedom and activism in today’s political climate. It is ironic that the University of Iowa has informed us – faculty and graduate students – that we cannot interfere with our students’ views on their personal social media accounts when their peers bring it to our attention, even when they are discriminatory against a specific racial and ethnic group, potentially putting students of color in danger, while universities have the power to pressure and censor us. It is also interesting that Twitter could be a great platform to build connections as well as to ruin one. We talked about how sometimes Twitter is not an ideal space for nuanced and in-depth discussions and miscommunication often happens. The guest shared their experience that online bullying and trolling can happen with a random tweet or heated debate.

I have been working on writing the code using scrapy API and experimenting with python, and it is surprisingly going well. Of course, I have encountered many roadblocks – bugs, crashes, and deadlocks, but the successful results from each step are very rewarding to see. It is also nice to have the support and resources going through the process. I plan to continue to sharpen and practice my coding skills to build a feminist digital archive for my dissertation.

This summer, I aim to learn the necessary skills to build a digital database for my dissertation and future related research. To do this, I am learning to use Python language to scrape data from Chinese social media websites. This project is important to my research on feminist preservation and archiving of heavily censored queer feminist content in the Chinese digital sphere.

For the first three weeks, I learned basic Python commands and generally worked to be comfortable with coding before I built my Python codes to scrape data. It is daunting for me to do this project, as I am not a quantitative scholar. I don’t reply on big data. And I am a firm believer in qualitative and mixed methods to unpack the stories behind social media posts. The pressure and the superiority of big data are visibly present in academia. Many people in power (e.g., your future employers, reviewers who decide the value of your research, and senior scholars) believe that big data is superior. Under this pressure, I want this summer not only to be an opportunity for me to learn Python, but a protected time to reflect on this status quo in academia. I know it is important to have data (whether big or small), but the core value of research is not data – it is our critical thinking and research ethics. I want to consider the community my research will benefit from and for. Some questions I have reflected on are: why do we need data? Who will benefit from a digital archive? Who will benefit from my research? And WHO will read my research?

During the time of this fellowship, I focus on scraping data for a particular topic – a femslash fandom genre Xiaosan Zhenggong CP (小三正宫CP, XSZG CP thereafter), which literally translates to the coupling of the third woman and wife from a heterosexual marriage/relationship. Fans of this genre create videos of a romantic relationship and intimate friendship between the third woman and wife who are competitors in a heteropatriarchal triad in the original TV shows. Against China’s stringent censorship of queer feminist content and systemic queerphobia, it is amazing that the coupling of these two female characters who are supposed to be fierce enemies has gained online traction among the fans of the TV shows and other netizens. I hope the data I collect from this fellowship can help me explore how XSZG CP’s femslash framework expresses queer desires and feminist messages, and how fans’ engagement with these fandom texts subverts the industrial heteropatriarchal norm.

For the second half of this fellowship, I imagine encountering lots of frustration with coding and running into bugs, but it is nice to know I have a supportive community to seek help from!