chen

27 Jan 2015

I’m always unsatisfied with China’s website banning policy, so my topic is about the great firewall. The most difficult part for me is to decide which part I should critique and what kind of data I should collect.

I intended to collect data about which website is banned and how long since it was banned. But it’s hard to tell the exact date — we don’t have this kind of data.

Then I thought maybe collecting data of posts over time which were pinned inside China in some banned websites, like Instagram in this case, might be a good idea.

I used a lot of time to label the latitude and longitude of a precision of 0.001 inside China mainland, and after I spent 1 hour on this work, I realized it was too trivial. So at last I just collected data from three major cities — Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

It is the first time for me to do data collection and scraping work, and it’s really interesting to decide the topic. And through this project, I feel I have more insights of data I collected, and I’d love to present and visualize it in the future.

Here are some positions I collected using Instagram (most of them are just restaurants:) ):

羊坊镇
阳坊胜利涮羊肉(胜利总店)
后白虎涧村
Yangfang, Beijing, China
阳坊大都涮羊肉(大都总店)
阳坊大都饭店 Yang Fang Da Du Hotel
白虎涧 Baihujian
Great Wall of China
Isle of Skye,Scotland
沙河水庫
沙河基地科技园区
百晨生态园
沙河大坝
先力片場
Mobil Ave
北亚花园
北亚小区
物美超市
China Beijing International Acupuncture Training Center
Grill 29
北七家
Braja ashram
八仙宾馆影视基地
Beiqijia
俄罗斯餐厅
Chateau Laffitte Hotel
Garden Hotel
虎鳄农场
福寿斋
福寿斋清真烤鸭店
顺丰优选北京仓
Casa da vovó Alzira
佰吉天园
beijing air harbor hotel
上井日式料理
海港一号
中国东方航空营销委员工食堂
沪渝高速
海港一號
帕缇欧香苑北门
Shanghai Qingpu
梦丹苑
Qing Pu Paladset
崧泽古文化遗址
Home
重庆家富富侨足浴
Longde Road Station
Longde Road Station
Longde Road Station
英倫風尚
DHJ Interlining (Chargeurs Interlining) | 迪志衬布(上海)
Ai Mei Chinese Restaurant
ZF China (Investment) Co.
阔客仕
好又多
Big Shot Beef

The not so interesting data(like position IDs and posts amount over month) can be found on github.

Here is my github repo.

My visualization plan includes a Chinese map, with the color showing the user post amount.

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