"I'm a big fan of Internet freedom, which is why I really don't like China's infamous firewall that blocks sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. But what else is it blocking? The government claims the Great Firewall is for the good of the whole country as Parent Control, but are all the sites it blocks harmful as they say?"

This project shows a big perspective of Chinese internet censorship, answers what the Great Firewall prevent people from by student's strong self-motivated exploration in data. I push the student to explore with their own questions and design thinking, express their concern through visual language. This project tells young generation need to understand what were censored and why, instead of Because I Said So.

GREATFIRE.ORG is a site that moniters thousands of sites to see whether they are blocked by the Firewall or not.

"I randomly chose 500 of those blocked sites and 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, where 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."

With filtering information catagory, language and keywords, user can quickly figured out the answer their own question. "What kind of Japanese websites were censored mostly?" then user can see lots of the pink dots represent porn sites.

Peiying graduated from GAFA and went to Parsons School of Design in 2014. The page on Peiying's site may have a live demo to play with.