Jenny Ho




Making property data approachable at Archipelago


Improving access to social services at Healthify


Personal projects

Personal projects



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Data analysis and visualization




This data visualization documents well-known websites that China blocks. Data cleansing, analysis, and visualization done in Tableau.

A conversation with a friend inspired this project: we were talking about blocked websites and how Peppa Pig got banned. We wondered if there was rhyme or reason to what gets censored? 



Is there rhyme or reason?

I learned how to use Tableau by messing around with Wikipedia’s list as the data source. After creating (and breaking) a few charts, I thought these questions would be interesting: What kind of websites are blocked? Are there patterns?

To answer the questions, I looked into how these variables were related:
  • What the banned website does
  • Which language(s) it’s in
  • How much traffic it gets, measured by Alexa ranking
  • Whether it was fully and/or currently blocked

Getting a sense of what's in the dataset.
When were sites blocked? Time data ended up being difficult to fact-check.
What are the most blocked categories? What did they do to get blocked?
We could infer who the intended audiences are through language.
I then cleaned the data with Tableau Prep. Some feedback I received was to combine similar/redundant categories to get to the main point without losing too much detail.


Draw bad ideas first. 

Initial ideas included highly guided visual essays and more exploratory designs where viewers can find patterns themselves.

Sketching ideas.
Lines emphasize relationships.
Clusters tell us what the largest categories are.

Organizing clusters to show relationships.
Mockup in Tableau.
I axed the Alexa ranking based on reactions when I shared the data viz. People were confused about what Alexa ranks meant, as opposed to something more straightforward like number of visits.


The final version shows us the patterns. 

The published version is an open-ended chart where websites are clustered by function and language. Each site is a single data point, which a viewer can hover over to see more details.

View the interactive version here.

The final design.