Project description:

Since 2019, Li Yao-Tai, the assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Hong Kong Baptist University, and his team had collected data on the Lennon Wall, totaling 10,000 texts and 2,076 images. Initium Media  worked with Li Yao-Tai’s team to analyze the data and select the most important 412 images to reconstruct the Lennon Wall during Hong Kong’s protest movement.

Impact reached:

In 2019, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in Hong Kong gathered for a march that had become one of the city’s biggest political crises in decades. So far, there is no document that can represent all the demonstrators to explain what the slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our times” really means.

If we want to know the answer to this question, there’s another way to do it besides looking at parliamentary votes and opinion polls: read Lennon Wall. During the protests, the Lennon Wall throughout Hong Kong harboured the true thoughts of Hong Kong citizens.

Techniques/technologies used:

The project was developed with Vue.js, compiled with Webpack, using pug as html templating language, and SASS for CSS preprocessing. It also use vue.js modules such as: Vuex, Vue Router for data and routing management. The data  format is csv, which allows people to collaborate and import it using google doc. 
 

What was the hardest part of this project?

It is not easy to keep all the data of the Lennon Wall because it is not permanent and can be destroyed by the Hong Kong government or the public. This is currently the only project that preserves the most important images in the Lennon Wall.

What can others learn from this project?

The project will help journalists find missing materials on the Lennon Wall and gain a better understanding of the protests in Hong Kong.

Project links:

theinitium.com/project/20200701-hongkong-lennon-wall-collection/#/