Spatio-Temporal Mapping of Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary: Applying Named Entity Recognition in Chinese Studies

Thore Tyborski

doi:10.5334/johd.544

Spatio-Temporal Mapping of Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary: Applying Named Entity Recognition in Chinese Studies

Journal of Open Humanities Data

Volume 12 (2026): Issue 1

By: Thore Tyborski

Open Access

|Jul 2026

Abstract

This dataset documents the locations mentioned in Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary, a collection of blog posts published during the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan between January 25, and March 24 in 2020. By processing the posts using Named Entity Recognition (NER) and manually reviewing the results, 141 unique mappable locations were identified, classified, and subsequently visualized on several maps. The dataset as well as the code to reproduce it are stored as JSON, CSV, HTML, and Python files on Zenodo. While the data has applications in understanding the impact of the lockdown on daily life and the influence of opinion leaders on the discourse on social media, the workflow could facilitate creating visual spatio-temporal representations of locations in other large contemporary Chinese datasets.

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