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:) ):

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.