I finally got the chance to build a closer connection with City Disc at the end of this term.

City Disc is a team composed of five young people in Wenzhou, focusing on the slow-paced documentation of local city culture. Deeply attracted by their output, I followed their social media account on Xiaohongshu and joined their online community at the beginning of the research in May.

Until the account of ArchiWenzhou got a preliminary exposure on Xiaohongshu last month and got a new follower who was a member of City Disc, I felt it was the time to invite them to an interview – The understandings of the cultural background in Wenzhou I got from the past six months enabled me to conduct the conversations with them in a high quality way, asking useful questions rather than simply absorbing the knowledge which I had not been familiar enough.

Consequently, I had an online interview with the founder Tang and the content creator Heidan of City Disc on November 23rd, with a duration of 75 minutes.

The interview had three topics: their motives to build this team, their daily operations and their attempts at external cooperations and commercializations. At the same time, I introduced what I had done throughout the year so that they could also understand further on my project.

There are some excerpts really impressive and instructive to me:

About the entry point of City Disc

小唐：“一开始 City Disc建立，是希望跟街巷去做一些链接，然后是以小见大的感觉。这和这个城市本身的气质是有关系的。我们不像北京，不像上海，他们可以做非常大气，非常磅礴的一些事情。温州更像是一个小城市，它会有小而精的一些温馨感。所以我们会希望以街巷的视觉，通过扫街去让大家在视觉上很直接地看到温州的可爱之处，然后再去引出比较深入的内容。”

Tang: “At the beginning, City Disc was established in the hope of making some links with the streets and alleys, in the sense of seeing the big from the small. This is also relevant to the city’s own temperament. We are not like Beijing or Shanghai. They can do things very majestic. Wenzhou is more like a small city with an exquisite sense of warmth. Therefore, we would like to capture the street visions to let everyone see the lovely points of Wenzhou directly, and then lead to a more in-depth content.”

About the definition of local culture (在地文化 ‘Zai Di Wen Hua’)

黑蛋：“现在幸运的是，我们这一代年轻人已经开始发现了自己对家乡温州并不是那么了解，所以我们才慢慢地愿意去研究温州的文化，去发现它的有趣和多元。City Disc一直是聚焦是温州在地文化的内容。对于在地文化的定义，我们也是思考了很久，后来是打算把“在”和“地”两个字分开解释。“在”是指现代的，正在进行的，这是一种生活方式。“地” 的话，就是一个地方经过一些时间积累，沉淀下来的东西。 City Disc 就是打算从地缘文化为出发，因为我们觉得地缘文化是一个会延伸并影响到整个地区的文化现象。我们要做的就是探索背后的一些文化溯源。”

Heidan: “Fortunately, young people of our generation have begun to find out that we do not know Wenzhou so well. Therefore, we are gradually willing to study the culture of Wenzhou, and discover its interesting and diversified parts. City Disc has always been focusing on ‘在地文化 Zai Di Wen Hua’ (local cultural in English. ‘Zai Di’ means local while ‘Wen Hua’ means culture) in Wenzhou. We have been thinking for a long time about the definition of ‘Zai Di’ (local), and then we decided to explain the words ‘Zai’ and ‘Di’ separately. The word ‘Zai’ means something modern and ongoing, representing a kind of lifestyle. The word ‘Di’ refers to the things that have been accumulated in a place over time. City Disc intends to start with geo-culture, because we feel it is a cultural phenomenon that extends and affects the whole region. What we want to do is to explore some of the cultural traces behind it.”

Interventions on the residents in old buildings

黑蛋：“之前我们去拍一些老建筑的时候，很多里面住在建筑里的人，他们其实也不知道这个建筑曾经有什么样的故事，不知道原来自己住的这个环境，这个建筑里面是这么的美，有这么多的细节。有一些细节做的很精美，比如说栏杆，还有一些浮雕。当我们将这些照片放在他们的面前的时候，他们就会突然意识到这些美丽的事物就是他们最熟悉的，每天在自己的身边的东西。”

Heidan: “When we went to shoot some old buildings before, for many people who lived inside these buildings, they actually didn’t know what kind of story this building used to have. They were not aware that the inside of this buildings was so beautiful with so many details. There were indeed some corners that were delicately done, like the railings, and some of the reliefs. When we put these photos in front of them, they would suddenly realise that these beautiful things were exactly what they were most familiar with and around them every day.”

The main focus and the meaning of the online community

黑蛋：“我们的内容其实都是来源于我们已经有的东西了。现代社会所拥有的东西其实已经太多了，我们不是需要再去创造一些新的东西，而是要从现在已经有的东西中去寻找到自己真正想要的东西。所以我们 City Disc 的社群里面更多的是分享，比如近期有哪些骑行的路线，或者是有哪些可以打卡游玩的。甚至我们会聊到温州某条街以前的样子，经历了多少的改变和已经消失的一些东西。因为时代的变迁不得已的一些改变，大家对此是惋惜还是说期盼，这样的心理状态，其实都是这个社群需要去交流跟互动的内容。”

Heidan: “Our content actually all comes from what we already have now. Modern society has so much stuff that we need to create nothing new but find what we really want from the existing stuff. That’s why the community of City Disc is more about sharing. For example, what cycling routes we recommend recently, or what we think worth hitting up for fun. We also talk about how a certain street in Wenzhou used to look like, how much it has changed and what has disappeared in this street. For those inevitable changes by times, if people are sorry about them or looking forward to these changes. Such kind of mindset is also the information that this community hopes everyone to communicate and share.”

小唐：“小红书群里面其实有很多人年龄不小了，可能40多50都有。对我们来说比较感慨的是，好像 City Disc 的内容，它不只是吸引年轻人，也可以吸引一些已经对温州非常了解的人。他们也很认可我们的内容，也希望能够加入比较严肃的探讨。他们也很愿意去聊，我觉得这可能是社群的意义吧，我们不只希望带动年轻人探索温州的文化或者美学，也想年纪大一点的人愿意跟我们分享他们所知道的温州和了解的温州是什么样子的。”

Tang: “There are many people in the community who are no longer young, maybe over 40 or 50 years old. What is appreciative for us is that our content does not just attract young people only, it also attracts people who already know Wenzhou very well. They also recognise our content and want to join in some serious discussions. They are very willing to talk about Wenzhou, and I think that’s probably one of the important meanings of this community. We don’t just want to drive young people to explore Wenzhou’s culture or aesthetics, but also want older generations to share with us what they know about Wenzhou.”

The elderly-friendly city

小唐：“我觉得一个城市对老年人很好这个点是很值得去炫耀的。这是我的一个小想法，个人来讲的话，我可能会觉得旧的很重要，就像为什么一个城市对老人友好这么重要，是因为我觉得只有展现出了对这个城市的老人很好，年轻人才敢在这个城市老去，才敢觉得我是安全的，在某一天我自己认为自己没价值的时候，这个城市仍然希望我能够过得很好，仍然希望我存在。

所以我们为什么去拍那些老街巷，甚至有一点点小小的缅怀的感觉，就是因为我们很希望让大家知道我们很重视这些老东西的价值。我们希望将对他们的回忆转换成当代的感受，并以一种更加容易接触到的方式呈现，让年轻人看到这些东西的美，这可能也是我们做 City Disc 其中的一个愿望。所以这个社群里面的一些沟通会让我们觉得 City Disc 真的有在做这个事情，有让大家感受到温馨的氛围。”

Tang: “I think the point of Wenzhou being nice to the elderly is something to brag about. Personally speaking, I feel that the old is important, just like why is it so important for a city to be friendly to the elderly. Only by showing that the elderly are well treated in this city, the young people will dare to grow old in this city and feel themselves safe. At a certain point when I feel myself having no value, there is still a city hoping that I can exist and have a good life.

So the reason why we chose to shoot those old streets and alleys, even with a sense of reminiscence, is because we want to let people know that we value these old things very much. We hope to convert those memories into contemporary feelings and present them in a more accessible way, so that young people can see the beauty of these things, which is probably one of our wishes in making City Disc. Therefore, the communication within the community makes us feel that City Disc is practically doing this, and there is a warm atmosphere for everyone.”

About de-commercialization

小唐：“很多人说要去商业化，其实是为了去除它目的性很强，让人感受到压迫的那一部分，但其实商业化的另一个点就是可持续性。我觉得这个点是非常有魅力的。一个品牌或一个人，你怎么能让很多人喜欢你和信任你，然后持续保持魅力和散发魅力，我觉得这个是一个很重要的特质。

对于现在温州的感觉，其实说实话，很多品牌他们确实很难活，所以他们想要赶紧得到一些钱，然后去支持他们的理想。可能有些时候发展着就会有一点点变味，或者是让大家感受不是特别好。所以有时候我们会想说，我们的去商业化，其实想去除的是很着急的部分，很焦虑的部分。对于 City Disc 来说的话，我们很幸运有这样一帮非常热血的人，大家也能够得到自己应有的报酬，再很慢很稳地去做这样的事情。”

Tang: “A lot of people are talking about de-commercialization, but it’s actually about removing the part that is too purposeful and makes people feel oppressed. The other point of commercialization is sustainability, which I think very fascinating. For a brand or a person, finding a way to make a lot of people like and trust you and being continuously attractive are very important traits to think about.

For my feeling of Wenzhou nowadays, to be honest, a lot of brands are really hard to survive, so they want to get some money in a hurry and then go to support their ideals. This might lead to the development being too far, or make people feel uncomfortable. So sometimes we would like to say that our de-commercialisation is actually trying to remove its anxious part. For City Disc, we are very lucky to have such a group of very enthusiastic people, and everyone can get their due reward, and then do things very slowly and steadily.”

There is one more point worth noticing. I did not know City Disc was also running a WeChat public account until the interview with them. After the interview, I searched it on WeChat and surprisingly found that the content here was more elaborate and well-curated compared with Xiaohongshu. Even though public account service on WeChat facilitate creators more space and freedom in producing content, as it was no longer trendy in recent years, the traffic was far more lower than Xiaohongshu.

It made me think further about the online operating part of the project: How could a new project guarantee it stability in the ever-changing internet environment? This might also be a topic worth exploring in the future.

I spent quite a long time to think about how I could present all the information included by ArchiWenzhou up to now.

New Insight: The Importance of External Promotion in this Project

As I mentioned in the earlier log, the most important finding I got through the operation of the social media account was people’s interest in engaging in problem-solving interactions. To be more specific in this case, the active exploration of city culture might be empowered by citizens’ desire to present the charm of their city to the outsiders. This must not be the only facilitator, but I think it is interesting enough to investigate more.

Even tracing back to the first phase intervention which I conducted face-to-face conversations with 32 citizens, I find such discussions were all hidden in the transcripts with thoughts on some questions. For example, what makes Wenzhou distinguish from other cities? What are the cultural assets in Wenzhou you lament the loss of? I did not realize it at that time.

I still remember I viewed the enhancement of city image to outsiders as a potential by-product six months ago, which was good to achieve but did not really matter. However, this new insight makes me realize that it is important to incorporate the external promotion into the key discussions in this project.

Mapping for ArchiWenzhou

Even though I am fully aware that the focus in the final stage should be evaluation, it is still necessary for me to invest some time to produce something as a periodical outcome, because the accumulation of the knowledge in this project should be attributed to all those Wenzhou citizens who have been involved. I hope to do something for them to help voice out their pride and passion toward Wenzhou, as a reward for their support as well as a continuous iteration of the intervention.

Consequently, I view the Festival as a window to carry out this final intervention (final to the course but not to the project :)))) that links the co-archivists of ArchiWenzhou with the Festival audiences in CSM. Ideally, I could make something interactive to collect some feedback from the Festival guests to the archive, and then get our archivists informed of the feedback.

After evaluating the content I collected in the past few months, I felt I might be interesting to form a map which included all aspects of the unique cultural characteristics in Wenzhou, and I categorized them further into three different themes: the humanistic geography, the ancient culture (especially the prosperous period of Song Dynasty in one thousand years ago), and the modern landscape. I also got benefit from this process because it helped me structure the content of the archive collected up to now.

Since I wanted to make the map look interesting but was not professional in drawing, seeking help with AI came to my mind in the first place. At first, I attempted to generate the landscape with some natural elements for the map through midjourney and it worked smoothly.

However, as I started to generate elements more humanistic, like temples or shops, it no longer worked well. There are two reasons I found.

First, the humanistic elements I would like to generate is quite localized. The current algorithm of midjourney has not been advanced enough to create images catering to the local culture in Wenzhou. Most of them are still reflecting a strong stereotype toward Chinese culture but neglect the geo-cultural diversity in China.

Second, the online resources of culture, art and humanity in Wenzhou are far less than I expected. For example, there is a kind of temple called the Hall of Sangang built in memory of a great historic figure called Chen Yi, which is ubiquitous in Wenzhou, but It is hard to even find a full view of any of the halls on the internet. Probably, it again reflects the citizens’ neglects of cultural heritage in the contemporary era. On the other hand, it also gives the direction for ArchiWezhou project in the future — functioning as a database to collect more useful recourses to future researchers.

Finally, I decided to draw this map by myself. It forced me to recall the skills for Chinese ink and wash painting which I learned 15 years ago. The process was not easy but unexpectedly enjoyable. It reminds me of my childhood in Wenzhou!

The next step is to make some brochures or a book functioning as a guidance to understand this map, in which I will include the research process, the method of participatory archiving, and quotations of content from the archivists who have engaged in the archiving process to provide the clues for different elements on the map.

In the first phase of the intervention, I encountered with a middle school teacher in Wenzhou, who was also one of the archivists participating in the project. However, after she shared her own experiences as a teacher, we further discussed the status quo of the local culture education in Wenzhou and the potential practices in cultural exploration in middle school education.

Even though I have already mentioned the potential future cooperation that I appointed with her in my previous report and presentations, some important information has been recollected in my mind through the editorial work I did last week for the transcript of our conversation.

There is the excerpt providing some information worth reflecting on :

Q：其实我有点好奇，现在学校教育里面有没有倡导孩子们去了解温州的传统文化？

Q: I’m actually a bit curious. Is there any advocacy within middle school education now for kids to learn about the traditional culture of Wenzhou?

A：虚的。我们有地方课程，每所学校都是要求一个星期要有一节地方课程的。这个地方可以指温州，也可以指浙江，然后我们也有配套的像《话说温州》这种教材，关于浙江也是有一本教材，但是就闲置掉了，没有去上这个课。

A: It is superficial. We have a local culture course nominally, and every school is required to have one lesson every week. The local culture refers to both Wenzhou and Zhejiang Province. We also have a textbook named ‘Talking about Wenzhou’ and a textbook about Zhejiang Province, but they are left unused.

这个课就是被冠以地方课程的名，但是它会被分配到其他的主科去，其实还是主科的各个老师去上。其实地方课程也是有相应的一些科研活动跟比赛的，但是那个是孤立的，比如说今天有一个地方课程的比赛了，然后就会有一个老师去研究一下做一下。

Even though the lesson is named as a local culture course, but it is actually assigned to other main subjects like literature and maths. In fact, this course is sometimes required to engage in some teaching and research activities initiated by governmental organizations, but it doesn’t get enough attention. For example, if there is a competition for the local culture course today, one of the teachers will go be asked do some research temporarily .

如果我们现在真的要看一下，《话说温州》这门课我们学校里没有一个老师可以教，其实也不容易。因为这门课肯定不能依托教材，谁能真正地了解温州的历史，还可以结合一些个人经历，把对温州的理解不偏颇地，系统地传达给学生，能做到这样也很困难。如果要有这样的课程的话，就必须要有相关的训练。

If we really want to look at whether there is a teacher in our school being able to teach the course, it is not an easy thing, because this course cannot merely rely on the textbook. There is a call for a teacher who can really understand the history of Wenzhou, be able to combine the history with personal experiences, and systematically convey these knowledge to students without biases. It is hard to achieve this goal. Teachers must be well trained.

如果让我去上这个课，我觉得我可能讲个两节课，就没有东西可以讲了，因为我不是很了解温州的一些深度的文化背景。

If I were to take this course, I think I might not have anything to say after two lessons, because I don’t really understand Wenzhou’s culture in depth.

其实你跟你聊天，我觉得我也是有很多启发的。

I think I have also been inspired through talking with you.

我突然想起来上个学期我们学校有个老师有一节课去参加比赛，课的主题叫“一树一城一群人”。树就是榕树，城就是温州，一群人就指温州人。你看他这个课很有文化，但是其实做的是思政课。当然是有很多温州元素在里面，但不是说大家都会去做当地本地的，只恰巧他选了这样子的一个课题。

It reminds me that a teacher in our school had a lesson for a competition last term, and the theme of the lesson was ‘A Tree, a City and a Group of People’. The tree refers to a banyan tree, the city is Wenzhou, and a group of people means Wenzhou citizens. You might feel that this class is very cultural-based, but in fact, it is a lesson for politics and ideology. It seemed to have a lot of Wenzhou elements, but it was just a coincidence that he chose this as a topic.

比如说像你刚给我看的九山湖老榕树的照片，我就想到我们可以选一个暑假，让学生去做一个课题，去了解温州的一些大的，老的榕树背后的故事。你去采访，比如说走到哪里的古村，有哪一棵老树，你去采访当地的老人，其实也很有意思对不对？

When you showed me a picture of the old banyan tree at Jiushan Lake just now, it popped up in my mind that we could assign students a project during the summer holiday to learn about the stories behind some of the big, old banyan trees in Wenzhou. You, for example, as a student, are required to go to the ancient village where there are some old trees and interview with the local elderly people. It sounds very interesting, right?

把内容做成海报，或者做成一些采访，视频记录，就很有意思。我觉得你这样做真的很好，也给了我很多想法，让我们直接或间接地去回忆自己的事情。

It would be fun to make the content into a poster, or make some video recordings of the interviews. I think it’s really nice of you to do this project. It also gives me a lot of ideas and helps us recall our own experiences directly or indirectly.

其实很多温州的老景点都可以去了解，只是我们现在都没有耐心去做这些事情。

There are actually a lot of old spots in Wenzhou worth visiting, but we just don’t even have the patience to do it right now.

This shows that there is considerable missing part for local culture education in Wenzhou.

I still remember when I was a primary school student in 2000s, there has already been a course set for Wenzhou local culture, and our maths teacher at that time was responsible for teaching it. Even though I hoped to hear more from the teacher about the stories behind the most bustling street or an small island which is full of ancient buildings in Wenzhou, he just repeated the content in the textbook or simply showed some relevant videos rather than sharing extra information or encouraging discussions among the class. It seems that there is no changes at all compared with 20 years ago.

However, it is actually not difficult to initiate something regarding the city cultural exploration in the educational environment. The teacher who had the conversation with me quickly came up with a brilliant idea to encourage students’ active exploration of city history simply through a look at some pictures I took in an old block in Wenzhou.

I feel it must be really powerful in laying emphasis on the training of exploratory practices in educational organizations, and the thoughts of teacher will definitely influence students a lot.

The second phase intervention has been conducting for three weeks. I would like to reflect respectively on the progress of the social media account operation on Xiaohongshu and the campaign The Wandering Camera in this post.

Test on Xiaohongshu

In the past three weeks, I have made 12 posts on Xiaohongshu with different types of content. I have probably experiences three different stages during this period in terms of data performance.

In the first week and the half, I just followed my plan of posting things within the five types as I mentioned in the earlier journal (https://22047852.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2024/10/18/unit-4-start-phase-ii-intervention/), and simultaneously, I shared the link of home page of this account on WeChat Moments, which was an online platform accessible to my friends on WeChat, to get some initial support and network flows from people who knew me.

These helped me get some support from some of the participants in the first phase intervention, my friends and family members, but as a new account, it was hard to quickly attract attentions from the public. The page views were quite low with an average of 100 views for each post, which led me to the data anxiety. Therefore, I started the investigation into the traffic mechanism of Xiaohongshu to look for methods to get higher flows.

Then I did two things. First, I spent 300 yuan (£33) on platform promotions, which helped my post get a higher exposure in home page streams of Wenzhou citizens detected by the algorithm. Second, I participated in some campaigns initiated by Xiaohongshu official accounts by relating my posts with the recent hot topics such as ‘documenting my city’ and ’Fashion is a cycle’ on Xiaohongshu and adding corresponding tags to get more free flows.

After that, even though there were more “likes” from viewers for each post, they tended to keep silent rather than commenting under the posts. The data performance was not satisfying enough to show the engagement of people. This happened in the last week, the time when I almost wanted to define this online intervention as a practice difficult to take effect in a short term.

However, an unexpected twist happened three days ago. I improvised a new post regarding the Festival of MAAI, in which I just shared my concern that I had no idea what I could demonstrate during the Festival. Surprisingly, this arouse people’s willingness to share their knowledge and preference in terms of city culture. The number of both comments of this post and followers of the account has been continuously growing.

This post seems to generate a new type: problem-solving interactions. To speculate a bit more, I guess such a problem-solving interaction provide people with a virtual space to engage in a specific problem under the city cultural theme, thus leading to people’s desires to suggest solutions triggered by their sense of belonging as well as their prides towards the city. At the same time, those citizens who have engaged in the discussion might be curious about the progress of my Festival display and consequently follow the account to track the development.

However, I am not sure whether this can be a new mode for this account to develop further, or this is just a sudden stroke of good luck. I will keep on exploring by continuously posting my progress relevant to the Festival, as at the same time share other types of content.

The Wandering Camera

The progress of this campaign is not as quick as I expected. As three weeks have passed, there were only three photos shoot by the participants and the camera has been held by the fourth participant for almost a week. But fortunately the camera has not been lost, and the online shared document is still alive to document where the participants took the pictures.

Although I should not negatively evaluate this practice just because the progress is slower than my expectation, emotionally I still hope this campaign could be done before the course ends. The only thing I can do is to remind the person who hold the camera to finish the task as soon as possible.

See what will happen next!

This post aims to fill one logical gap in my project, as was pointed out by our language tutor Roger two weeks ago, through answering the question: why participatory archiving is adopted in this project to explore the cultural significance in the modern society rather than disclose cultural history in the past?

Archives are supposed to document what happened in the past.

As Spohnholz (2014) stated, archives ‘were seen to offer the most direct access to voices from past centuries’ by the new academic historians in the early 19th century.

Spohnholz also mentioned political or religious institutions in the Middle Ages, which used archives as tools to preserve their authorities. These archives not simply functioned as descriptive content, but influenced people’s thoughts at that time as well as affected later generations. For example, historians might ‘have sometimes overemphasized the importance of centralized states and official churches in the pre-modern era, or have treated as marginal those people who those officials wanted to treat as marginal’.

Such references to the archives reflect people’s ‘thinking about history’, an act of a general meaning making of the history (Tosh, 2008). It might values the outcome over the process, just focusing on the influences that history have brought to the modern society.

However, to take full advantage of histories or archives, it might be better to ‘think with history’, as was advocated by Carl Schorske (2014), to help people ‘be alert to the implications that many of its findings have for public understanding’ (Tosh, 2008).

As was explained by Schorske, there are two modes of ‘thinking with history’. First, the images of the past help us position ourselves – are we different from the past, or sharing some similarities with it. Second, the temporal flows revealed by history demonstrate narratives of change and subsequently form our historical present. Based on my understanding, through placing ourselves in the temporal flow and thinking about how the present relates to the past and future, we might find the distinctiveness and potentials opportunities in the contemporary era.

That is the reason why I am using ‘cultural significance’ rather than ‘cultural history’ in the research question while introducing the word archive in this project. Even though people participating in my project are encouraged to recollect and share their experiences in the past to contribute to the archive, the objective is to help people understand their influences on reinvigorating the potentials of abundant cultural assets, either being passed on from the past or emerging in recent years, during the process of recalling and archiving.

Then it is easier to relate the project to participatory archiving. Participatory archive encourages users to ‘be reconceptualized as active participants in the co-production of historical understanding’ (Benoit & Eveleigh, 2021), which facilitate active exploration of culture rather than knowledge input in a passive mode.

I will also translate the answer above into Chinese and share it on Xiaohongshu.

Bibliography

Benoit, I.E. and Eveleigh, A. (2021) Participatory archives: Theory and practice. London: Facet.

Schorske, C.E. (1998) Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Tosh, J. (2008) Why History Matters. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

University of Cambridge (2014) Q&A: how archives make history. Available at: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/qa-how-archives-make-history (Accessed: 19 October 2024)

I started my phase two intervention in this week: test two different forms of online participatory archiving through two social platforms – using Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) as a test in the public sphere and using WeChat as a test in the private sphere for the campaign The Wandering Camera.

Test on Xiaohongshu

On the Chinese social platform Xiaohongshu, I created a new social account for the project. Xiaohongshu is featured as a lifestyle platform that inspires people to discover and connect with a range of diverse lifestyles, which has developed the accurate algorithm in pinpointing and gathering different kinds of communities. The image of a sheep robot rather than myself as the account owner was set initially to help the account appear less biased in terms of operation and easier to approach for everyone. 

The account would be testing on several types of posts and find how people interact with them online. There would be five types for the time being:

• Introduction of academic theories and practice of participatory archiving worldwide. I would like to share some secondary research I did during the past few month regarding participatory archiving. Ideally these secondary research could be combined with the project, to reveal the meaning of this project.
• Archivists’ stories. Since I have collected a certain number of stories from city archivists during the summer, Xiaohongshu can work as a platform which allows a higher exposure of these stuff than an independent website.
• Different topics on city culture for discussions. During the period of the first intervention, I did not make conversations fixed in a certain range of topics, but allowed all talks to develop in a free flow. However, such practice would work more effectively when being face-to-face. Luckily, through analysis of the transcripts, I have found some topics reflecting some shared concerns of the archivists, which are potential to be discussed further.
• Small campaigns. No fixed content. I have currently added a post announcing the start of the first campaign The Wandering Camera which will take place in the private sphere.
• Memes, or some entertaining content to attract more flows to the home page.

Although Xiaohongshu is the platform which most caters to this project in China for the time being, it still has some negative influencing factors.

First, the platform has been continuously commercializing in the past two years, growing into one of the most competitive e-commerce platforms in China. As it is devoting more resources in e-com businesses, ArchiWenzhou, a non-profitable and culture-based project, might be hard to grow rapidly.

Second, the accurate algorithm might lead to information cocoon. Since my target is to raise citizens’ awareness of the existence of rich cultural assets of Wenzhou, the project should at first seek for a higher exposure to Wenzhou citizens who do not pay much attention to the city culture. However, the algorithm might lead to my target group’s limited access to the content.

Third, it has a strict regulation on users’ outflow. There is a risk of being blocked when the account makes disclosure of the email address or the link of the project website within the platform, which makes it more difficult to build further connections with online participants from Xiaohongshu.

The Wandering Camera

The second part of my phase two intervention will be a combination of online community operations and real-life interactions between people. This could be viewed as a small experiment: use a disposable film camera and pass it from person to person, and find how people use this device to capture the interesting views in Wenzhou.

If the journey of this camera could start from a person who has a good grasp of photographic skills, this experiment might have a higher opportunity to make success. Therefore, while the idea for this campaign was in its infancy, I posted a moment on WeChat and asked who with expertise could help in starting the experiment:

Out of my expectation, a photographer who took part in my first intervention responded to me in the first place, and discussed with me how to further increase the likelihood of success.

Finally, we decided to utilize an online shared document for participants to mark the locations where they take the photos, as well as create a WeChat group chat as a private sphere to track the progress of the camera’s journey, encourage participants’ interactions and collect the participants’ feedback afterwards.

And the campaign was named The Wandering Camera.

The Moment of Uncertainty

In the last unit, I have already been aware that this project might take the risk of non-sustainability if I shift all of my focuses to online platforms, because most of the experiences and reflections I got from face-to-face activities would no longer be applicable when being online. However, confined by my current location, this might be my only choice in these three months if I hope to test more.

I am somewhat pessimistic about progress at this stage, since it is not easy to make everything in control. The posts in the social account might trigger seldom discussions, and the camera might be lost halfway as well… I am facing the moment of uncertainty.

I just wish myself luck!

As I mentioned in the last post, there were two key insights after the first intervention. I attempted to compare them with the theoretical system of participatory archiving which I referred to.

The first insight

“In the theme of city culture, the boundaries between experts and non-experts are blurred because the cultural assets could be more dynamic and be hidden in residents’ thoughts and daily lives.”

This might occur, but is not a definite truth, because this assumption is probably influenced by the democratization of archival power (Cook, 2013). There are two broad categories in regards to the extent of democratization (Benoit and Eveleigh, 2021): first are mediated projects, which include professional and institutional mediation; second are less-/non- mediated projects, which are run by participants and community members. ArchiWenzhou belongs to the second category.

To be more specific, I adopted the thematic approach that focuses on groups underrepresented in traditional archives. Benoit and Eveleigh used the example of the South Asian American Digital Archive to explain this approach further. The archive was founded to document South Asian Americans’ experiences and specifically created outside traditional archival spaces. While actively collecting historical materials, the archive also engages with ‘digital participatory microhistory projects’(Caswell, 2014) that encourage community members to create new records by themselves.

When I decide to magnify the voices of the public rather than the authority because of the rationale behind my methodology, the shared heritage, hobbies or other common interests of citizens in Wenzhou will also be highlighted and can not be represented by the experts in the field of culture in the traditional sense.

During unit 3, I noted that some people declined my invitation because they felt themselves not literate enough to talk about ‘city culture’. However, the further explanation of this insight might be useful in the future intervention. It will probably help people break their stereotype by highlighting the importance of their voices in such a non-mediated project.

The second insight

“To motivate people’s active participation, it is good to place myself in a relatively passive position, while creating the atmosphere which triggers people’s willingness to share.”

There are no directly related academic theories under participatory archiving. However, since participatory archives are often defined as ‘community centered and self-defined’ (Benoit and Eveleigh, 2021), some useful references are possible to be obtained from the theme of community participation and empowerment.

The Wheel of Participation developed by South Lanarkshire Council ‘provides a theoretical underpinning for an open and democratic planning system that encourages the right participation techniques to achieve the identified objectives – be that information, consultation, participation and/or empowerment’ (Davidson, 1998). This framework has been applied in World Health Organization (WHO) European Healthy Cities initiative (Dooris and Heritage, 2011).

(The Wheel of Participation)

The wheel suggests the appropriate level of community involvement to achieve different objectives, rather than give any fixed instructions targeting at a completely empowered community in city planning.

It helps me realize that the way to achieve empowerment or active participation cannot be simply summarized as “being passive”. The target of my project could be further identified and guided by some concrete approaches. It is not easy to reach a conclusion right now, but hopefully it can be more clear as the project develops over the remaining time.

In addition, I discussed my research question with our language tutor Roger on Thursday. At first glance, Roger could not understand my use of “cultural significance” rather than “cultural history” because I adopted the method of archiving which usually refers to history. This helped me find the gap that I did not elaborate my motive of using archive as the tool: My focus is contemporary era but not history, but the process of archiving history could make people recollect things that matter in the modern society. Therefore, more research on the relationship between contemporary era and history will be useful to support the argumentation as well as the branding of the project.

Bibliography

Benoit, I.E. and Eveleigh, A. (2021) Participatory archives: Theory and practice. London: Facet.

Caswell, M. (2014) ‘Seeing Yourself in History: community archives and the fight against symbolic annihilation’, The Public Historian , 36 (4), pp. 26– 37.

Cook, T. (2012) ‘Evidence, memory, identity, and community: Four shifting archival paradigms’, Archival Science, 13(2–3), pp. 95–120. doi:10.1007/s10502-012-9180-7.

Davidson, S. (1998) `Spinning the wheel of empowerment’, Planning, vol 1262, 3 April, pp14–15.

Dooris, M. and Heritage, Z. (2011) ‘Healthy Cities: Facilitating the active participation and empowerment of local people’, Journal of Urban Health, 90(S1), pp. 74–91. doi:10.1007/s11524-011-9623-0.

I told Jasminka about my problem in time allocation for different tasks.

On one hand, due to the underestimated workload for editing the data collected in July, I need to go on with transcriptions and website construction, also including my further plan in online promotion. On the other hand, the focus of this unit should be reflection, which requires more investment in combining the previous action research with theory-based analysis. With limited remaining time for the course, I have been in a daze about what is important and what to do first.

Jasminka suggested a review of the research question, which I felt echoed the feedback from Mark: Further precision of the research question would be beneficial. The currently research question showed some ambiguity in stating “explore their own cultural significance”. After evaluating its relationship with the methodology I adopt currently and the intervention I did, I would like to refine the research question a little bit more:

How can small manufacturing-based cities facilitate citizen’s active exploration of their own cultural significance? – a case study of Wenzhou city in China

Then think about what is the nature of my updated research question. Since “how can” is the fixed pattern for MA applied imagination, I should, based on my understanding, continuously optimize the methodology which helps approach the goal.

There are two key takeaways I got from the first intervention. First, in the theme of city culture, the boundaries between experts and non-experts are blurred because the cultural assets could be more dynamic and be hidden in residents’ thoughts and daily lives. Second, to motivate people’s active participation, it is good to place myself in a relatively passive position, while creating the atmosphere which triggers people’s willingness to share.

I think the next step for carrying out reflective practice is to, as Mark suggested, further explore how these takeaways gathered from the intervention align with or challenge the academic theories I have referred to. It should start immediately. Based on this, I could development my milestone outcome for unit 4 as well as provide some guidance to my online promotion practice in the next two months if possible.

At the same time, for the online promotion practice, I should also break them down for better implementation. There will be some different parts:

• Continue with the editorial work of participants’ audio records collected in July. Ideally 1 or 2 people’s stories could be uploaded on the website each week.
• Go on generating the new topics in the column “Discussions” based on new reflections on the archivists’ statement. There is no frequency requirements (potentially this part is important for my form of presentation at the Festival).
• Improve the narrative, or the branding, of this project. I think more introductions on participatory archiving and the development of this project up to now might be beneficial to enhance the professionalism (but whether this can help in people’s active participation still requires to be testified). Hopefully to be done by Oct 15th.
• Create the new social account on LittlleRedBook for this project, and add new post based on the branding of this project and the column “Discussions”. Ideally 1 or 2 posts could be added each week. Hopefully to start on Oct 15th.

I was informed of the concept of critical incident on Tuesday’s class, which reminded me of the research edge I met during the summer. Therefore, I decided to research more on critical incident technique and analyze my research edge by using this tool.

There was a question I raised in Unit 3 presentation as my research edge:

How to uncover the negative parts hidden in the city culture?

This question appeared in my mind because of the conversation with a middle-aged owner of enterprise, who is still paying a great effort to his business but the economic benefits are much less favorable than before based on objective facts. I would like to call him S.

The conversation took place in his company in Wenzhou. What I expected is to lead S to recall and talk about his own life stories, but he just avoided it and instead presented the slides showing how successful the company was between 1990 and 2010. On my way back home, I felt somehow disappointed since the data I collected in this talk were completely contrary to my expectation and this intervention was proved to be invalid to S.

However, I discovered the representativeness of S’s experience as enterprise owners in Wenzhou. Wenzhou was typical in the prosperous development of private businesses after the reform and opening up policy in China in 1990s. However, there are many entrepreneurs whose businesses went downhill because they failed to cope with market changes after 2010.

Meanwhile, after realizing this fact, I found S was not the only case during my editorial work period in August: Among all participants. there are more people who skipped over the dishonorable experiences in their career.

These made me wonder how to create a safe space for people to talk about their failures, or negative parts of their own life experiences, since culture significance of a city should not be composed of simple narratives which only state positive stuff.

The critical incident technique might work in making some progress for this question. As is defined by Flanagan (1954), “The critical incident technique consists of a set of procedures for collecting direct observations of human behavior in such a way as to facilitate their potential usefulness in solving practical problems and developing broad psychological principles”. My failure to explore further about negative parts of the personal experiences made me feel that it could be good to seek solutions to tackle this problem based on reacting to my participants’ responses to my clear demands and making adjustments accordingly.

And identified by Serrat (2017), I need to invest time in understanding what core questions need to be addressed. I would like to list them here and response to them preliminarily:

• What were the events or circumstances that led to the critical incident?

First, the vague theme for the first intervention, which just invited people to talk about their life stories in Wenzhou. Second, probably the insufficiently safe environment of the intervention.

• What were the behaviors of the agents that made these (events or circumstances)a critical incident?

People’s avoidance of talking about negative parts of their lives.

• What were the outcomes of the critical incident?

Less comprehensive data collection.

• What are the possible future outcomes if behaviors remain unchanged?

The project might yield limited knowledge in city culture exploration.

• What are the possible future outcomes if behaviors change based on lessonslearned?

The archive might be more valuable in revealing the culture significance of Wenzhou, which makes this project more fruitful.

Bibliography

Flanagan, J. C. (1954). The critical incident technique. Psychological Bulletin, 51(4), pp. 327–358. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0061470

Serrat, O. (2017). The Critical Incident Technique. Knowledge Solutions. Singapore: Springer, pp. 1077-1083.

The good news is that I have successfully set the online archive for the program!!

Here is the link: archiwenzhou.cn

I will keep uploading the content to this site. The site will not only function as the partial presentation of my first intervention, but work as the start of my second intervention.

Based on my data processing so far and the discussion with the tutor during the latest tutorial, there are some subsequent tasks.

First, I need to make the analysis of the interviewees from an academic standpoint. The online archive is currently composed of edited stories and opinions from my interviewees, who played the role as the archivists in my program, but it is not enough to go with the editorial work only.

For example, among them, some might be defined as experts who provided constructive advice and opinions, and some are stakeholders who gave feedback on the intervention, whether positive or not. At the same time, feedback might be in different forms: their comments, their invitations or their further actions. I should analyzed things beyond transcripts of interviews (e.g. the interactions with archivists after the interview).

Second, I need to construct the online archive as soon as possible, for the next intervention. To be honest, the editorial work is quite time-consuming and takes a lot of energy. As I mentioned in the last log, the time for each interview took one hour on average, which has already been longer than my estimation. However, the time for editing one interview actually took more than three hours, including but not being limited by the time for information verification, accent correction and dialect recognition. There is also a suggestion from the tutor that it could be better to improve the branding for the online archive. Before the next intervention, this archive might need better story telling and more clear website home page.

Last but not least, I should always keep the potential cooperation in mind and seek opportunities of connecting local government, media or other institutions.