Idea 1: As Sally recommended the website The Pudding to me, I was obsessed with playing around different digital publications the authors made. In particular, I enjoyed The BIG [CENSORED] THEORY. The authors used an interactive display to illustrate a humanistic question about censorship in China. While the author watched the first 100 episodes of Big Bang Theory side-by-side, manually documented the plot differents, and categorized the differences into seven groups, I wonder if it could be done in a more effective way? Something like “smart big data”?

So my first idea is to analyze gender representations in Chinese TV dramas from 2000s-2020s. I want to investigate how female characters (including gender identities, relationships, sexual orientations, body images, personalities, etc.) are portrayed in Chinese dramas over the past twenty years. I also want to visualize the data in a humanistic approach where different dimensions of data could be identified. I want to represent and interpret many demographic features in my visuals to create a more complex statistical view of females in Chinese TV dramas.

Idea 2: I want to visualize the COVID cases from 2020-2022 in China. Over the past years, I have seen a lot of reported COVID cases in China and read through tens of graphs that indicated the inflection and death rates by days, provinces, and age groups.

I was moved by Dr. John Snow’s chart tracing the source of epidemic outbreaks and geographical location. Although I merely care for the number of case increases, I want to remind myself that the number represents life and none of these are identical. There are much more to explore, including how each outbreak impacts an individual, their degrees of vulnerability, the impact of their illness, effect on the family and loved ones.