Dataset

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Title of Dataset
Weiboscope Open Data
Author of Dataset
Fu, King Wa1
Contact
Fu, King Wa1
Date of Dataset Creation
2017-06-21
Description
Welcome to the Open Weiboscope Data Access website. Weiboscope is a data collection and visualization project developed by the research team at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong (JMSC). One of the objectives of the project is to make censored Sina Weibo posts of a selected group of Chinese microbloggers publicly accessible, which enables academic use of the data for better understanding of the social media in China and making the Chinese media system more transparent. Since January 2011, the project has been regularly sampling timelines of more than 350,000 Chinese microbloggers who have more than 1,000 followers. The methodology has been detailed in an IEEE Internet Computing article (Fu, Chan, Chau, 2013). Besides, we have sampled Sina Weibo accounts randomly since 2012 and the samples' most recent timeline were collected and stored into the dataset. Our sampling approach is reported in a PLOS ONE article (Fu, Chau, 2013). This site contains all the Weiboscope data collected in the year 2012. We are delighted to share the data for open access. But for ethical reason, the data are anonymized, i.e. real user and message id are replaced by pseudo ID. When using the data, please cite the paper below. King-wa Fu, CH Chan, Michael Chau. Assessing Censorship on Microblogs in China: Discriminatory Keyword Analysis and Impact Evaluation of the 'Real Name Registration' Policy. IEEE Internet Computing. 2013; 17(3): 42-50. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MIC.2013.28 Data Set Statistics: Number of weibo messages: 226841122 Number of deleted messages: 10865955 Number of censored ('Permission Denied') messages: 86083 Number of unique weibo users: 14387628 Enquiry: Send your question/comment to weiboscope@gmail.com or follow us on Google+. The project is funded by the University of Hong Kong Seed Funding Program for Basic Research.
Citation
Fu, KW. (2017). Weiboscope Open Data. (Dataset) The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong SAR.
Publisher
The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong SAR
Subject (RGC Codes)
H2 — Social and Behavioural Sciences — 社會及行為學
  • 4419 — Social Policy — 社會政策
Subject (ANZSRC)
20 — LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE — 語言, 傳播與文化
  • 2001 — COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA STUDIES — 傳播與媒體研究
    • 200102 — Communication Technology and Digital Media Studies — 傳播技術與數位媒體
Keyword
internet
censorship
china
Affiliations
  1. The University of Hong Kong