Since August, the Moving Data Moving People project has been meeting in the Lab to explore Weibo data, collected by Qiuyu Jiang and Mace Ojala. After early MDMP research showed considerable public discussion in China around the inclusion of blood in the pilot social credit system schemes, the project decided to use digital methods to explore some of the Weibo based conversations.
In the Lab, working through the data, discussions have been about workarounds, internet infrastructures and the web we live with, as much as they have been about the thematic content of the Weibo posts collected to understand aspects of public discussion around China’s emerging Social Credit System.
Rachel Douglas-Jones, Qiuyu Jiang, and Mace Ojala are developing a reflection paper on method, along with an academic paper drawing on anthropological literature on blood donation along with histories of public health in China in order to review why the boundaries of the SCS were so tested by this 2019 pronouncement.