Project Spark: A Counter-Archive of Chinese Women's Collective Wisdom

Inspiration

I am a Chinese woman. I grew up in a society shaped by 5,000 years of patriarchy—where history books were filled with men, where 5,000 collections of women's writings from the Ming and Qing dynasties were left to decay. Less than a quarter survived.

This erasure is not abstract to me. I see it in my own family.

My grandmother worked her entire life to support us. When my aunt was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, my mother and aunt-in-law dropped everything to care for her—cooking, bathing her, sleeping on hospital chairs. No one asked them. They simply went. The women in my family carry the family on their shoulders.

There are millions of families like mine. Women whose labor is invisible. Women whose stories will never be recorded.

This is what erasure looks like. Quiet. A woman's entire life, simply forgotten.

Today, erasure happens at the speed of a click. Any feminist discussion can be accused of "inciting gender antagonism" and removed instantly. #MeToo was censored; women renamed it #MiTu (rice bunny) just to keep talking.

When women's words can be erased with a click, what survives?

What I Built

Spark weaves women's writing into a web of mutual citation. A "spark" is a structural link between works—visible, permanent, mutual. Ideas linked together are harder to erase than ideas standing alone.

Thoughts here are not islands, but sparks that ignite one another.

This is infrastructure for collective empowerment. When women cite women, we build our own canon. Spark transforms isolated voices into a community, and a community into a movement with memory.

How I Built It

I built Spark using React 19 and TypeScript to ensure the data structures—the relationships between ancestors and descendants—were type-safe and robust. I utilized vibe coding with Gemini 3 Pro in Google AI Studio, using AI assistance to rapidly iterate on complex UI components and bridge high-level concepts with pixel-perfect execution.

Constellation View (D3.js): The heart of Spark is a force-directed graph. This isn't just eye candy—it's navigation. It forces users to see the relationships between ideas, not just the ideas themselves.

Kindred Spirits (Gemini 3 Flash): One of the hardest parts of writing is feeling alone. The spark network relies on users knowing what to link to—but what if you don't know a relevant piece exists? Kindred Spirits solves this. As you write a couple sentences , Gemini analyzes your draft's semantic meaning and queries the archive. A sidebar appears: "Your thoughts on 'invisible labor' resonate with [Project Title] by Anqi. Mark as inspiration?" It connects women who haven't met yet.

Challenges: Balancing political vision with intuitive UX. Building a mobile-first experience for China while handling complex graph visualizations. Accepting that an MVP cannot fix systemic censorship—but can prove a different way of preserving is possible.

We will build what survives.

Built With

• css3
• css3-frameworks-&-libraries:-react-19
• d3.js
• gemini
• html5
• lucide
• lucide-react-apis-&-cloud-services:-google-gemini-api-(gemini-3-flash-preview)
• react-19
• react-markdown
• react-router-dom
• tailwind-css
• typescript