MAS S61 final project 1st draft

For the final class project, I want to do something with the data collected from the University of Hong Kong Journalism and Media Studies Centre’s WeiboScope Search project. In class last week, Ethan Zuckerman suggested that one option may be to do an online art piece using the most censored Chinese words on Sina Weibo. Out of curiosity, I did a draft of the 100 most censored Chinese words on Sina Weibo to see what came up. Here’s a quick translation of the most censored Chinese words:

转发微博 retweet weibo (simplified Chinese)
retweet
转发 retweet
轉發微博 retweet weibo (traditional Chinese)
哈哈 ha ha
偷笑 smile
嘻嘻 hee hee
呵呵 he he
ha
哈哈哈 ha ha ha
蜡烛 candle
anger
吃惊 surprise
tears
围观 crowd
话筒 microphone
思考 think
praise
威武 mighty
求证 confirm
decline
挖鼻屎 pick boogers

The most common words are the Chinese equivalent of “retweet” or “RT.” The next most common are expressions, such as “ha ha” or “anger.” It doesn’t make much sense that the 50 cent party are simply censoring emotions. I’ll need to figure out a way to come up with a way to dig one layer deeper.

2 thoughts on “MAS S61 final project 1st draft

  1. Hi – I’ve joined some groups on Soundcloud who do field recordings and I’ve found recordings from China, I’d be interested to try, if you are interested, adding a soundtrack to the censorship story and seeing if it works in any way.

    I could add the track just above the translations after the intro and people could respond – if no one likes it I’ll just take it down, what do you reckon?
    H

  2. Hi Chi Chu,

    A common approach to this is to create a list of “stop words” — things which you have identified as meaningless for your analysis — and remove them from the data source before you do your analysis. That might help you dig further.

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