This post is part of the Meet the ETCL Team series, which introduces the wonderful people who work in the lab and who have worked with us in the past.
Simin (CiCi) Li joined the lab as a Digital Scholarship Fellow (DSF) in the fall of 2019, but she learned about the lab before beginning an MA in Political Science at UVic in 2018. Her MA work looks at language and collective identity with a focus on Cantonese, using data from self-created media such as YouTube videos and Facebook posts. She had planned to do fieldwork in Canton and Hong Kong, but those had to be cancelled due to political protests. CiCi will present a draft of her thesis at an international relations conference in Hawaii in March 2020.
She first joined the lab as an Open Knowledge Practicum (OKP) Fellow in the Spring 2019 session, conducting research for a conference presentation about Xi Jinping’s clan using social network analysis and contributing to the Wikipedia article New Zhijiang Army. She has since written an article based on this research and submitted it for review.
CiCi’s DSF research is an extension of her OKP research, in which she uses statistics and data visualizations to find a model describing the phenomenon of unnatural deaths of public servants in China, many of which are suicides, but some of which are undetermined. Using tools such as R, Excel, and GIS, CiCi considers geographical distribution and the relationships among corruption, crime, and depression.
CiCi enjoys having space to work and learn in the lab, as well as opportunities to meet people from across the university.
When she’s not doing research, CiCi works part-time as a marketing strategist and office assistant of two non-profit organizations. She enjoys reading, writing, travelling, and volunteering.