I am Ziyan, a digital media scholar
constantly exploring
the appeal of communication.

Blog Radio Series

Focusing on campus life, the interesting topics and relaxed and lively pace are much loved by students.

Social Media Marketing Cases

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Social media planning and operations for a health organisation, successfully gaining 55,000 followers.

Short video production projects

Click on the link to learn about the culture of Chinese medicine

Produce short video programmes on health topics, such as health exercises and health recipes.

Poster Design Project

Spreading the holiday spirit with colorful visual elements.

Web Scraping

Understand web data scraping and actively explore various data crawling and analyzing software.

Website production

Understand what constitutes a website and create own personal website.

Data Analyses and Visualisation

Design and production of data collection forms and visualisation of existing data.

Machine learning

Exposure to machine learning for visual recognition and critical reflection on machine recognition bias in practice.

Manual Scraping

The categorisation of information content is hand-scraped, and the data is used to look at individuals' media usage habits and to think about the relationship between data and personal identity shaping.

Interactive Narratives Producing

It was a lot of fun to build the story through practice, from story ideas to shooting the illustrations!

HAVE A LOOK

Week 1 Introducing Digital Practices

This week I learnt about the fundamental concepts of digital practices, including the profound impact of digital media on society and its core characteristics. We discussed how technology has shaped the way communication is done, the channels through which information is accessed, and how the media industry is using these technological innovations to reshape the audience experience.

There is some difficulty in understanding how to translate the abstract concept of "practice" into concrete examples, especially in making the link between theory and practical application, which requires more thought.

The ecological perspective proposed by Kember, S. and Zylinska, J. (2012) dovetails with systems thinking in the curriculum, which discusses how digital technologies affect social, cultural and natural environments, and how these environments, in turn, influence the development of digital technologies.

I would like to gain a deeper understanding of how digital practices are represented in different cultural contexts and how these theories can be applied in intercultural communication.

Week 2 Understanding Digital Media

This week's focus was on understanding the nature of digital media and its far-reaching impact on the dissemination of information. In addition, we learnt about the basic components of a website, including structural components and exterior design, and created a website ourselves.

In fact, understanding HTML structures and identifying CSS selectors posed some initial challenges, and using tools like Selenium to handle dynamic content required additional effort. On another way, t was difficult to determine where web scraping might cross the line into unethical practices, especially in cases where terms of service were ambiguous.

In his book, van Dijck (2013) analyses the guidance of algorithms and interface design on user behaviour, which fits with the course's discussion of user engagement and creativity on digital platforms, which explores how social media platforms are designed to lead to more user interactions and how these interactions affect users' social relationships.

I would like to learn more about page design for mobile software and expand my knowledge in the field of interaction.

Week 3 Web Scraping

I learned the foundational techniques for extracting data from websites using tools like Web Scraper, octoparse. Prioritise, I understanded the importance of adhering to website terms of service and respected intellectual property rights, highlightted potential issues like copyright infringement and data misuse.

In fact, understanding HTML structures and identifying CSS selectors posed some initial challenges, and using tools like Selenium to handle dynamic content required additional effort. On another way, it was difficult to determine where web scraping might cross the line into unethical practices, especially in cases where terms of service were ambiguous.

I want to get a clear understanding of when scraping is appropriate and how to ensure that it meets legal standards, and I want to explore how industries can use scraping data to update their strategies, such as recommender systems or targeted marketing.

Week 4 Data Analyses

We learnt the whole processction, including pre-thinking about the object of collection, the type of data, the wa Wof collection, etc.nwhile, we found out the efficiency problems, ethical problems and information cocoon problems assccompanyiroce press process processss of data collection in practice.

There are thousands of data out there, but which ones really reflect the core of the problem? Accurately selecting data is the most fundamental issue of the whole process, but also the most important, and I still need to keep improving that ability through practice.

D'Ignazio, C. and Klein, L.F. (2020) in the article reminded me that datasets are not neutral, but are constructed in a particular socio-political context. Practitioners must interrogate who benefits from datasets? Who is excluded or marginalised?

Week 5 Data VIsualization

This week learnt how data visualisation can be used to discover connections between things and make complex information easier to understand. The focus was on combining data science with media studies and exploring the use of data visualisation in news reporting and communication.

In acute data visualisation, I find that when using excel, I often don't know how to use the f(x) function in it, but I've found that Tableau Public can help me!

In readings, the discussion of 'data power' made me reflect on the ethics of data visualisation, and how to avoid misrepresentation or oversimplification of data in the process of data collection and visualisation, which is a persistent proposition.

Week 6 Senses And Bodies

In this lecture, the teacher took us through the concepts of networked bodies and senses and the quantified self. I learnt how technology can intervene and quantify our bodily and sensory experiences, transforming them into data to be used for various purposes.

Although the concept of biopower in the context of datafication was mentioned in the readings and in the course, understanding how these abstract theories concretely affect society, especially marginalised groups, was challenging for me.

This course emphasised the complex interactions between technology, the body and society. It made me realise the importance of critically examining the everydayisation of self-tracking and the commercialisation of sensory experience, as these practices are reshaping human behaviour in ways that are often more conducive to corporate interests.

Week 7 Machine Learning

Training simple models using Google's Teachable Machine at the workshop gave me a practical experience of the fundamentals of machine learning, especially as it applies to the field of facial recognition.

When training the model, I realised that there is a possibility of error in the recognition mechanism and that this threshold varies depending on the similarity of the samples, so is it safe to speculate that when there are fewer samples of certain races or genders in the dataset, the model's recognition accuracy will be significantly reduced?

I'm very interested in machine learning, and in my future studies I'd also like to explore how to balance innovation and privacy protection in technology development, particularly the potential threat to individual rights that the widespread use of facial recognition may pose, and how to adapt algorithmic mechanisms to try to reduce racial as well as gender inequality.

Week 8 Identity and Representation

This week focused on identity and reproduction, specifically how digital media shapes and redefines individual and group identities.

During the workshop, I learnt that various websites are identifying users' content preferences and group attributes by quantifying different types of content, in addition, after the class I did manual crawling and identification, a process that made me aware of the subjectivity that exists in categorisation (e.g. definitions of memes and jokes can vary from person to person), which can lead to inconsistencies in categorisation.

Suggesting relevant types of posts to users based on how often the category appears, a step that mimics the process of social media algorithms prioritising content based on user behaviour. This step mimics the process of social media algorithms prioritising content based on user behaviour. However, there is also a risk of "information cocooning".

Week 9 Data Ethnography

In analysing the 32 sets of data, I found that categorising content can help us to understand data classification and algorithmic recognition in a more structured way. However, dynamic content may involve multiple categories at once, forced categorisation can mask its diversity, and ignoring the context in which a post is published independently of textual research makes it difficult to understand the motivations and emotions behind dynamic content.For example, a "product/advertisement" dynamic may be ironic, and simple categorisation cannot capture this nuance. This reminds me to be wary of an overly mechanistic approach to data analysis.

Also, in the process of collecting data, I found that the time of publication of the content is also an important factor, to get useful data from the content is to make sure that the publication of the text of the study is recent, otherwise, it may reduce the accuracy of the data. Through exploratory tasks, we discussed community attributes, reviewed the communities I've joined on various social media platforms, and gained a deep understanding of the tension between personal privacy and the business value of data.

Recommender systems are not only a technological tool, but also a manifestation of economic and social power that determines who has access to what information, and personalised advertising is one of those powers, and we should be wary of information cocoons within communities and the externalisation of community attributes fuelled by algorithms.

Week 10 Interactive Narratives

In this lesson, I learnt about interactive narratives, in which the writer introduces a new storyline through new characters or objects, while it is up to the reader to decide exactly which path to walk into. For example, in the Space Frogs mini-game, different characters are unlocked by the items the reader carries. The one who chooses "bank" faces a lamb, while the one who chooses "food" faces a kitten. In a way, the interactive narrative can only close the loop once the reader has completed his or her choices. It's a very interesting feeling, to be separated from the screen, yet co-create a plot with personal attributes.

Visual presentation as part of the story has an important place in the development of the story. Space Frogs, as a fairy tale, has an overall low-saturation colour palette and cartoony pixelated images, prompting readers to move the story forward with a softer mindset. If Space Frog had been presented in black and white, I think I would have been more "cold-blooded" in my choice of paths, who knows?

After creating an interactive narrative with the group, I created a humble short story with my new jelly cat as the main character. Sometimes, I have to use backtracking for the sake of the story. It also made me realise that while interactive narratives greatly expand the possibilities of traditional writing by offering readers the opportunity to explore multiple endings or parallel narrative structures, the complexity of branching narratives can lead to creators getting lost in plot design and struggling to manage relationships between nodes, especially when there are many branches and crossovers, which made me reflect on the sense of user experience.