Abstracts

Commons, Platforms and Emerging Knowledge Frameworks

Monday December 2nd – Tuesday December 3rd 2024

Keynote Speakers

Fewster, Jenny (Australian Research Data Commons, HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons) and Robert dhurwain McLellan (U Queensland, and Language Data Commons of Australia), “CAREful FAIRness and principles for Indigenous Data Governance”

Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) research data is essential to enhance our understanding of culture, society, and human well-being. In 2020, the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons (HASS and I RDC) Program was established to create a comprehensive digital HASS and Indigenous research infrastructure capability. However, the current state of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research data assets leaves them vulnerable to loss, limits data discovery and use, even by Traditional Owners, and results in the duplication and the over-researching of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. It is imperative to note that Indigenous data governance and sovereignty are crucial underlying principles in the HASS and I RDC. The ARDC is known globally as a strong advocate for the FAIR principles. These principles cross-cut all our work. This continues under the thematic RDCs, and we now want to extend this to realising the CARE principles. The RDC has the potential to support and enhance the cultural and social aspects of research and national challenges while preserving Indigenous knowledge and data by adhering to the principles of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and CARE (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) and informing Indigenous Data Governance and Sovereignty. In implementing these principles, the Research Data Commons needs to collaborate closely with Indigenous communities, Elders, and organisations to co-design policies and practices that are culturally responsive, inclusive, and empowering. Meaningful engagement, capacity building, and community-led initiatives should be central to the commons’ operations, ensuring that Indigenous Australians are actively involved in decision-making, benefit sharing, and research outcomes. Indigenous knowledge is potentially relevant to all research domains, and this RDC is an initial step towards demonstrating the value of this approach. The HASS&I RDC is the first RDC to apply both FAIR and CARE principles. (BIOS: Jenny is the Director of the Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences and Indigenous Research Data Commons at the ARDC. With over 20 years’ experience in collecting, managing and disseminating research and cultural heritage data and resources, Jenny is passionate about delivering quality research infrastructure and data to meet the diverse needs of HASS and Indigenous researchers. Robert, a Gureng Gureng descendant from the Wide Bay region, is a community researcher, director and governance practitioner. He is an Industry Fellow at the University of QLD and Project Manager for Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA), and a strong advocate for truth telling and speaking up for Aboriginal rights, justice, and economic advancement. Dedicated to authentic inclusion of First Nations voices, Robert is passionate about revitalising Indigenous languages, cultures and building culturally inclusive, honourable and cohesive communities.)

Appavoo, Clare (Canadian Research Knowledge Network), “From Open Access to Open Research Infrastructure: CRKN’s evolving strategy to meet the needs of open digital scholarship”

Over the past 25 years, the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) has advanced access to knowledge in Canada. As a network of member libraries, we continue to evolve to meet the needs of the research community. Our core content licensing program pursues multiple pathways to open access to ensure that journal content from commercial and not-for-profit publishers is openly accessible. We are also driving the evolution of open knowledge through our plans to transform our Canadiana collections and platform into cutting-edge, open, digital research infrastructure. Through the Digital Collections of the Future (DCoF) project we will embed FAIR, CARE, UNDRIP, and OCAP principles at the heart of our open research infrastructure. By substantially modernizing Canadiana, guided by an equity, diversity, and inclusion framework and by international open science, data management, and cultural heritage principles, DCoF will facilitate world-leading research that uncovers the historical forces that shape the Canadian present. The DCoF project will represent a watershed in the creation of data to train AI to recognize past inequity and to expect, rather than flatten out, diversity. (Bio: Clare Appavoo has been the Executive Director of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) for 12 years. Through her leadership, the dynamic team at CRKN collaborates and innovates to meet the needs of CRKN’s 87 member institutions, the researchers that they serve, and the wider community of memory institutions. CRKN’s content licensing program delivers over $146M of digital journal and database content annually to member libraries, while actively advancing open access to Canadian research and supporting global open access initiatives. CRKN’s heritage program, Canadiana, provides access to and preservation of digital Canadian heritage content for researchers and the public and is a critical component of HSS research infrastructure in Canada. In collaboration with other key stakeholders in the Canadian research community, CRKN provides administrative leadership and support for both ORCID-CA, Datacite Canada, and the Coalition for Canadian Digital Heritage. Clare is actively involved in global open knowledge initiatives, serving on the Governing Council of SCOAP3, the ORCID Board of Directors, and the arXiv Institutions Advisory Council.)

Lawrence, Amanda (RMIT & Australian Internet Observatory), “Citizen science, research infrastructure and Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs)”

Citizen science and crowdsourcing approaches and the participation architectures and research infrastructure required to support them, are well established in areas such as environmental science but relatively recent for many humanities and social science disciplines including fields such as digital media and internet studies. Even Wikipedia has generally been considered a content dissemination system rather than a citizen science platform or research infrastructure. However with the advent of Wikidata and the diversity of projects and institutions now working with Wikimedia content and/or infrastructure, this is changing. Indeed, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Movement Strategy states that, “By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge.” In 2023 the European Commission designated Wikipedia a “Very Large Online Platform” (VLOP) under the Digital Services Act (EU DSA), along with Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, Google Search, and YouTube. In contrast to Wikimedia, very little is known about the data and algorithms used by the other VLOPs, all multinational companies, and access to data for research is limited. While regulators try to find ways to ensure greater accountability for VLOPs and other , researchers are turning to citizen science approaches, such as data donations, to study digital platforms in new ways. This talk will discuss how citizen science approaches and infrastructure are being developed and used, with Wikimedia projects, and at the Australian Internet Observatory, to observe digital platforms and build a better internet. (Bio: TBC)

Session Talks

Amell, Brittany, Alan Colin-Arce, Graham Jensen, Ray Siemens (U Victoria), “Platforms–Agents, Foes, or Allies of Scholarly Communication?”

In this presentation, we discuss the “Platforms–Agents, Foes, and Allies of Scholarly Communication?” research scan, developed at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab. The scan, with its list of annotated resources, offers a foundation to understanding and critiquing platforms and their implications for open access publishing, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. It tracks some of the drift the meaning of “platforms” has undergone over the years, for example from platforms as technical infrastructure to platforms as dominant intermediaries in the dissemination of knowledge. Ultimately, this scan offers scholars in the humanities and social sciences a foundation for understanding the transformative role of platforms in scholarly communication, aligning with themes of openness, equity, and community engagement in digital scholarship. Organized into thematic sections, the scan presents annotations on key resources that include an introduction to platforms, as well as their governance and ethics, and research infrastructures. By engaging with these resources, the research scan highlights how platforms can and have shaped scholarly publishing, addressing both the opportunities for increased access and the risks related to the commodification of data and algorithmic inequities.

Arbuckle, Alyssa (Canadian Research Knowledge Network, INKE), Caroline Winter (U Victoria), Randa El Katib (UTSC), Graham Jensen (U Victoria), Ray Siemens (U Victoria), “The Open Scholarship Press, an INKE/CAPOS Research Intervention”

The Open Scholarship Press (https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Open_Scholarship_Press), is a research intervention supported by the INKE and CAPOS research partnership groups. Its goal so far has been to explore publicly available open infrastructures to support book-length materials of pertinence to our communities, beginning with a number of functional prototypes and so far culminating in the publication of eight volumes aligning with the work of our community, in areas of Community, Connection, Policy, and Training — a significant scan + analytical overview, and a separate primer of essential readings with an introduction, for each of those four topics. Lead editors and authors are Arbuckle, Winter, El Katib, and Jensen, working with members across our community; Siemens will present on this work on behalf of the group.

Arthur, Paul (Edith Cowan U), “Digital History Methods for Mapping Slavery”

This presentation reports on an Australian Research Council-funded project that focuses on the development of digital tools to map biographical narratives and data relating to the legacies of British slavery in Australia from the 1830s onward (https://australian-legacies-slavery.org/about). Developing innovative methods for biographical research and digital mapping, this data-intensive project is tracing the movement of capital, people and culture from slave-owning Britain to Western Australia, to produce new understandings of the continuing impact of slavery wealth in shaping colonial immigration, investment, and law. The project seeks to reveal how the wealth from slavery led to the formation of Australian institutions, funded large land holdings, and helped form influential networks of association in the early colonial period that coincided with the abolition of slavery in Britain. The research team is presenting its primary research data using the Australian research infrastructure the ‘Time-Layered Cultural Map of Australia’ (TLCMap) (https://www.tlcmap.org/). The resource has been developed to help researchers create digital maps from their own cultural, textual, and historical data, layered with datasets already registered on the platform. This presentation provides a report on a series of biographical mapping and visualisation experiments using TLCMap to show movement of slavery wealth and influence across the Australian continent.

Burrows, Simon (Western Sydney U), “Open to Collaboration: From Shared Data to Shared Database”

Digital Humanities projects face many common problems, ranging from infrastructure to funding, sustainability, digital preservation, personnel and maintenance issues. In this paper, I will discuss the survival strategies that have kept the long-running, award-winning French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (FBTEE) database project online for well over a decade, explore lessons learned along the way and outline our strategies for future survival. The FBTEE project interface, published online in 2012, hailed for ‘bringing the historical profession into the age of interactive digital technologies and GIS’ was one of the first DH projects to give away its data for free (as has subsequently become required by grant-giving agencies), as well as its vector maps. Subsequently, the survival has been assured through an international move (the ambiguity is intentional), a migration to a new research platform (HEURIST) and a database-sharing collaboration with another ERC-funded project (PaPa project based in Trier), and, through its Chief Investigator, helping to establish international networks of projects and researchers (including CAPOS). FBTEE has benefitted also from four major tranches of funding, as well as inspiring and collaborating with a range of cognate projects. For all the plaudits and apparent success, as well as its use in learning and teaching and research around the globe, FBTEE’s future has never been assured, and long-term viability remains a challenge. In conclusion, I will reveal our future plans and suggest possible longer-term solutions for problems we faced, to enable other open scholarship projects to remain online.

Cabe, L. Nicol (Flinders U), “An Elevator to the Ivory Tower: Proposing a Collaborative Open Social Research Approach that Includes Creatives and the Public”

While undertaking research for my PhD, I decided on the artifact-exegesis style rather than a traditional thesis specifically because my values align with CAPOS’s ‘open social scholarship’ method. CAPOS defined this approach in their 2023 conference proceedings as: ‘a movement that prioritizes access to information, social knowledge creation, and cross-community engagement’ – a remediation of the old artist marketing exhortations to ‘know your audience’, ‘write with your audience in mind’, and ‘go where your audience is’. My research focuses on the dramaturgical impact of post-pandemic integration of online and digital tools into theatre and performance practices; while I believe this information is valuable to my fellow academics, they are not my only audience. Before returning to school in 2020, I worked for 15 years as a theatre maker and my current research not only fills a gap in academic knowledge but has practical applications for theatre makers. I chose a free, online, searchable guide created on the platform GitBook as my artifact, integrating academic and dramaturgical understandings of digital theatre into more colloquial guides and recommendations focused on curious theatre practitioners simply looking for help making choices with their performance pursuits. The long-term goal of the artifact is to maintain this website with new information, ideally with the help of the global theatre community as contributors, integrating the philosophical foundations of the open-source software community displayed in GitHub, among other platforms. This lightning talk walks through my process of finding my audience (artists) and meeting them where they are (online).

Gencer, Rıdvan (Western Sydney U), “Introducing High School Students to Digital Humanities with Open Scholarship”

As the effects of digitalization are increasing day by day and the domain of digital humanities is expanding, it becomes important for students at different grade levels to learn technology and related knowledge, skills and values (Battershill & Ross, 2018). Considering the rapid developments in the field of digital humanities, the issue of how this is reflected and taught in education is becoming increasingly important (Hirsch, 2012). With this rapid development and transformation, questions about which levels of education to teach digital humanities, what to teach and how to teach it have become increasingly prominent on the agenda (Mahony & Pierazzo, 2012). In general, when we look at the level at which digital humanities education is carried out, it is seen that it is carried out at the undergraduate and graduate education levels of various universities, digital humanities centers and within different institutions and organizations (Cobb & Golub, 2022; Mapes, 2020; Hirsch, 2012). The teaching of digital humanities is becoming increasingly widespread and a wide variety of practices are emerging. It can be said that the dissemination of experiences, practices and resources related to the education of digital humanities within the scope of open scholarship will enable the dissemination of trainings at different grade levels. Students of the digital age will be more engaged with the knowledge, skills, and values that digital humanities are the source of. (Colligan & Sharren, 2020). One of the most important issues in this context is how high school students will come into contact with digital humanities. Considering the current dialogues and relationships of the new generations defined as digital natives with technology, it can be said that this first contact will not be challenging, on the contrary, it will offer great opportunities (Murphy & Smith, 2017; Ardıç & Altun, 2017). Because the world in which the student of the digital age is born has a structure framed by digital. This digital frame is becoming more and more at the center of their lives every day (Gençer & Altun, 2021). Teaching digital humanities at high school level will facilitate students to learn the knowledge, skills and value structures of this transformation. Open scholarship opportunities for teaching digital humanities at high school level will facilitate the creation of new opportunities. Montfort (2016) and Fyfe (2011) argue that teaching digital humanities at the high school level will facilitate the in-depth teaching of traditional humanities. In this context, how to introduce digital humanities to high school students will be discussed, including topics such as close and distant reading, social media analysis, geographical information systems, interpretation of historical data, text analysis, network analysis and visualizations, which are important topics of digital humanities, should be taught. The general structure of the digital humanities program to be developed to be taught at high school level will be evaluated in terms of the content of the program. As a result of these evaluations, a general framework for a digital humanities program to be taught at high school level will be tried to be put forward.

Greenhill, Kit (Australian Research Data Commons), “Considering skills for researchers to co-create digital research infrastructure”

Aims to start a conversation about whether there is a skills component to increasing the knowledge/confidence researchers need before they co-contribute or partner in digital research infrastructure projects. Is the reason researchers with potentially valuable disciplinary contributions don’t come to the table because they believe that it is only for people with tech skills, and they are not “techie”? Is it about knowledge, confidence, interest, time, institutional recognition or something else? Can skills initiatives help here? Once researchers have their toes in the water, what new skills beyond tech do they need to successfully partner in research infrastructure projects?

Henrickson, Leah, Maggie Nolan (U Queensland), “Australian AI in the Archive: An AustLit Project”

In 2023, Australia was identified as the nation most nervous about AI by an Ipsos survey of 31 countries (69%; https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2023-07/Ipsos%20Global%20AI%202023%20Report-WEB.pdf). Efforts have been underway to put Australians’ minds at ease through advisory committees, consultations, and regulations. However, this action has tended to be reactive instead of proactive. If Australia wants to ensure responsible and relevant AI, we need to imagine potential scenarios before they happen. And, of course, we already do this – in storytelling. By looking to literature, policymakers and publics could develop understandings of how Australians perceive AI rooted in how we’ve imagined it. This is what Australian AI in the Archive aims to help Australians do. Australian AI in the Archive (https://www.austlit.edu.au/artificialintelligence) is a bibliographical dataset of representations of artificial intelligence and robots in Australian literature, collated and hosted by AustLit (https://www.austlit.edu.au), thereby drawing upon existing research infrastructure. Searching ‘artificial intelligence’ in the AustLit database brings up 469 results, dating back to 1951. ‘Robots’ brings up even more, with over 1,400 results dating back to 1891. By training students to undertake public-facing digital bibliographic work, and inviting the public to engage with the project, we hope to create and maintain a public-facing resource that documents representations of AI and robots in Australian literature. Australian AI in the Archive is a work in progress, and we welcome CAPOS ‘24 participants’ feedback and suggestions related to future research directions, partnerships, funding opportunities, and public engagement mechanisms.

Jensen, Graham (U Victoria), “Growth Platforms of a Different Kind: Not-for-Profit Digital Research Commons as Platforms for Building Community and Increasing Access to Knowledge”

In business and economics, “growth platforms” are initiatives intended to grow one thing: profits. By contrast, and in much closer alignment with the theme for this year’s CAPOS gathering, my talk will focus on platforms of a different kind: emphatically open, digital platforms without regard for financial gain that work instead towards the growth of research communities and shared knowledge repositories. This latter type of “growth” platform is, as I will suggest, well-suited to address many of the issues plaguing academics and academic infrastructures—including the commodification of research data and the commercial enclosure of research commons or shared spaces that were previously open, free, and accessible to all. The core of this talk will focus on the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, which is an in-development community space for academics, research partners and stakeholders, students, and interested members of the public (https://hsscommons.ca). Serving as a hub for open social scholarship, the HSS Commons combines elements of social networking sites, tools for collaboration, and institutional repositories, allowing researchers to freely share, access, re-purpose, and develop scholarly projects, publications, educational resources, data, and tools. It is an initiative of the INKE Partnership, with project partners in Canada, Australia, and the United States—including the Canadian-Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship, the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities, the University of Newcastle, Western Sydney University, the University of Victoria, the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, and others. The talk will include a brief overview of some of the ways that, unlike commercial knowledge commons or academic social networking sites, the HSS Commons facilitates open social scholarship in keeping with emerging digital research infrastructure and research data management best practices. It will also include growth highlights from the project’s ongoing translation and community-building efforts with national and international partners.

Jensen, Graham, Brittany Amell, Ray Siemens (U Victoria), “An Academic Commons for Collaboration and Open Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences”

An update from the demo session last year, introducing participants to the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, an in-development community space for academics, research partners and stakeholders, students, and interested members of the public in Canada and beyond (https://hsscommons.ca). The platform’s many social networking, collaboration, and publishing features allow researchers to freely share, access, re-purpose, and develop scholarly projects, publications, educational resources, data, and tools. The HSS Commons is an initiative of the INKE Partnership and CAPOS initiative, with project partners in Canada, Australia, and reaching around the globe. You can learn more about the HSS Commons, our values, and some of the site’s features through our Blog post, “Community over Commercialization”: https://hsscommons.ca/en/blog/2024/02/the-canadian-hss-commons-community-over-commercialization.

McCrabb, Ian (Systemik Solutions), “Glycerine – Image Annotation Platform”

The adoption of the international image interoperability framework (IIIF) in cultural institutions presents an opportunity for seamless collaboration on the annotation of images. A limiting factor has been the threshold of development required to implement a scholarly annotation system. Glycerine Workbench provides a suite of annotation tools and end-to-end workflows for researchers, curators and students to collaborate on projects across repositories. Images can be organized into collections and shared with collaborators. Sets of annotations can combine semantic tags from domain-specific vocabularies with critical analysis in multiple languages. Annotated images can be published as research outputs in immersive and engaging visualizations and archived in sustainable formats. Glycerine provides a comprehensive implementation framework for integration with institutional digital asset management and content management systems. Through integration with Image AI and institutional API’s, and import of TEI files, Glycerine supports scalable development of high quality annotated collections. Initially designed for the sophisticated annotation features of Glycerine Workbench, Glycerine Viewer has been released as an open source IIIF viewer to support IIIF manifests and compliant annotations built with other tools. Glycerine Viewer provides the most comprehensive annotation feature set of any IIIF Viewer. Presentation and publication use cases for research, curation and education practices are being encapsulated in custom user interfaces. Glycerine Workbench was developed in 2023 in partnership with ARDC as part of their program of funding of humanities research. Its provided free to the research and GLAM sector in Australia.

Moody, Alayne (Flinders U), “Bayesian statistics for open scholarship in the humanities”

Many of the methods used in digital humanities (DH) research are grounded in probability theory, especially in Bayes’ Rule, which is at the core of machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and one of the two main branches of statistics. In this lightening talk, I discuss the differences between Bayesian statistics and the more common Frequentist statistics, with a focus on how the Bayesian approach is conducive to open scholarship in the humanities. I give an overview of Bayes Theorem, including its origin, fall from grace and resurgence (McGrayne, 2011). I explain how its use can be optimized for prediction, as in ML/AI, or for explanation, as in statistical modeling. While many DH scholars have embraced Bayesian ML/AI methods, very few make use of Bayesian statistical methods, despite acknowledgement of their potential (Bamman et al., 2014; Dobson, 2019; Kukkonen, 2014; Mosteller & Wallace, 1964; Rubio-Campillo, 2016; Underwood, 2012; Weingart, 2012; Zolotarova, 2023). Instead, the more rigid, black-box methods of Frequentist statistics abound in DH research, leading to a disconnect among humanities researchers who have shared interests but very different and arguably discordant methodologies (Da, 2019; McElreath, 2016). I touch on how Bayesian methods have been used to examine complex humanistic questions in the social and other sciences, and I share how I have used them to examine well-being in historical life writing (Moody, 2024). I conclude by reflecting on how increased familiarity with and use of Bayesian statistics in the humanities might support open scholarship by facilitating communication and collaboration among intra- and inter-disciplinary scholars as well as with policy makers and the public.

Pascoe, Bill (U Melbourne), “Public Web Scholarship: Institutions, maintenance and truth telling.”

This talk briefly discusses challenges in maintaining public digital humanities scholarship, research and development amidst institutional short termism, based on first hand experience with TLCMap, and reflecting on past and potential future Truth Telling projects.

Russo-Batterham, Daniel, David Goodman (U Melbourne), “Building a Database of British Colonial Hansards: Early Work and Reflections”

Historians have long criticised the limitations of studying history primarily within national frameworks, since the flow of ideas and people’s movements extend well beyond these confines, and modern constructs of nationhood are at times applied anachronistically. To date, however, the research infrastructure required to support transnational histories remains seriously underdeveloped. Today, published Hansards capture verbatim transcripts of parliamentary proceedings, representing a valuable resource for a broad range of researchers, from historians to linguists, as well as the public as a whole. Historical Hansards, however, particularly those from subnational jurisdictions, are often available only as PDF files of variable quality, so a great deal of work remains to make them useful to research. Searching across jurisdictions, moreover, to trace the development of ideas, remains a major challenge. In this presentation, we demonstrate and reflect on our work to construct a prototype database of Colonial Hansards (and newspaper transcripts of parliamentary debates) focussed (initially) on the years 1863 to 1865. We have developed a corpus of more than 16,000 pages across the jurisdictions of New South Wales, New Zealand, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, and Victoria. We describe our project from the creation of the corpus and associated metadata, through to leveraging new technologies to facilitate searching Hansards across jurisdictional boundaries. Large Language Models and advances in modes of search driven by semantics, rather than keywords, have led to new and fascinating ways of navigating and researching these materials. Through historical case studies, we demonstrate the research potential of our database and reflect critically on current constraints and future opportunities.

Siemens, Lynne (U Victoria), “‘Year of Evolution’: Year 3 of an Interdisciplinary Research Project on Open Social Scholarship”

Building on earlier research about collaboration in an open social scholarship project (Siemens, 2023; https://popjournal.ca/issue05/siemens), this paper examines the Implementing New Knowledge Environment’s third year of collaborating with academic and academic-adjacent researchers and partners. Using yearly interviews with team members, the paper will in particular explore the evolution of collaboration at individual, team and extra-to-team levels. It will also examine the impact of COVID on large scale collaboration.

Wang, Zhiwei (U Edinburgh), “Being an ‘ICHINA’ Online – Everyday Discursive and Habitual (Re)production of Internet-Mediated Chinese National Identity in the Era of Consumerism and Fandom”

A further investigation into how Chinese national(ist) discourses are daily (re)shaped online by diverse socio-political actors (especially ordinary users) can contribute to not only deeper understandings of Chinese national sentiments on China’s Internet but also richer insights into the socio-technical ecology of the contemporary Chinese digital (and physical) world. I adopt an ethnographic methodology with Sina Weibo and bilibili as ‘fieldsites’. The data collection method is virtual ethnographic observation of everyday national(ist) discussions on both sites. On each ‘fieldsite’, I observe how different socio-political actors contribute to the discursive (re)generation of Chinese national identity on a day-to-day basis with attention to forms and content of national(ist) accounts that they publicise on each ‘fieldsite’, contextual factors of their posting and reposting of and commenting on national(ist) narratives and their interactions with other users about certain national(ist) discourses on each platform. Critical discourse analysis is employed to analyse data. From November 2021 to December 2022, I conducted 36 weeks’ observations with 36 sets of fieldnotes. Based on fieldnotes of the first week’s observations, I found multifarious national(ist) discourses on both ‘fieldsites’. Second, Sina Weibo and bilibili users have agency in interpreting and deploying concrete national(ist) discourses despite the leading role played by the government and the two platforms in deciding on the basic framework of national expressions. Third, the (re)production process of national(ist) discourses on Sina Weibo and bilibili depends upon not only technical affordances and limitations of the two sites but also some established socio-political mechanisms and conventions in offline China.