The AIO is developing frameworks to improve access to digital platform data without the need for deep technical knowledge and sophisticated computational techniques. Our current toolkit features new methods that can be integrated into qualitative and quantitative research designs, making research more rigorous and data-driven.
Data donation is an ethically grounded method that works directly with research participants. The idea is that research participants consent to donate their data from social media platforms, their phone screens, or browser windows. This data, securely stored and accessed via a set of tools, allows researchers to explore the kinds of information their respondents are exposed to, study how individual behaviours affect platform usage, and examine how online content shapes opinions.
Data Donation
A research environment to facilitate the collection, extraction, and analysis of donated social media archives.
A mobile app that captures screen videos, processes them for analysis, and provides them for research purposes.
Browser extensions that capture, store, and enrich data directly from Google Chrome.
Data Collection Tools and Datasets
The AIO provides easy access to the web archiving method where researchers can record and use websites as an alternative to web scraping. We also offer a range of unique, curated data collections focused on Australian public discourse. These rich, historical, and ongoing datasets are ready for analysis and can be accessed using API and Jupyter notebooks.
Create interactive archives of web pages as they appear in a browser.
A rich databank of posts and comments from over 590 Australian-related subreddits.
Aggregates reader commentary from Australian news websites and related Reddit threads.
Dashboards
Our dashboards provide powerful interfaces for exploring and visualising large-scale datasets. These tools are designed to lower the technical barrier, enabling researchers to uncover trends and insights without needing to write code.
An interactive dashboard for exploring historical social media data with topic modelling, word clouds, and sentiment analysis.
A tool for real-time analysis of social media data (external link).