✽ Research
✽ UX and UI Design
✽ Data Visualization
✽ Creative Coding
Interactive data visualization depicting 500 websites blocked by China's infamous Firewall.
Challenge
I believe in freedom of speech, so I dislike it when governments start banning things on the internet. This is commonly done in China for the good of the whole country, but are all the sites it blocks as harmful as they say? I set out to find out.
Approach
Using Greatfire.org, a site that monitors thousands of sites to see whether they are blocked by the Firewall or not. I randomly chose 500 of those blocked sites and manually categorized them into 13 different categories and 33 sub-categories. I also organized them by site language and gave each site one to three keywords that described the site’s content. Then I loaded all that data into Processing to create this interactive visualization.
Results
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Each individual dot represents a site and each circle represents a category. The labels beside the dots tell which sub-category the dots belong to. The more dots there are, the larger the circle.
Hovering over the words on the left will reveal specific data about each category, or show which sites share those specific traits. Hovering over the dots in the image will reveal more data about that specific dot. To rotate the image, use the left/right keys. To zoom in and out, use the up/down keys. Keys ‘a’ and ‘s’ will tilt the image on its X axis while keys ‘z’ and ‘x’ will tilt it on its Y axis. Hitting Enter/Return will reset the image. To see the fully interactive version, please see it here: http://openprocessing.org/sketch/121705.
As for is the Firewall really blocking things that are harmful? I will let the data speak for itself.
