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:

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.