The Australian Digital Observatory is an ARDC platform working to establish a national infrastructure to support a diverse array of researchers, especially in the humanities, in accessing and working with dynamic digital data, including existing collections of national interest across Twitter/X, FlickR, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram and gaming platforms such as Steam and Discord.
The Australian Digital Observatory (ADO) is an interdisciplinary team of data scientists, software developers, support staff, and academics at key locations around Australia, including Brisbane (Queensland University of Technology), Sydney (UNSW), and Melbourne (The University of Melbourne).
The ADO provides an ecosystem of resources and services that enable research including data-related services, events, training and workshops, datasets, and software and technical utilities/systems.
With these resources, the ADO supports researchers throughout all stages of the research data lifecycle (explore, collect, tidy and model, store and organise, analyse, and publish). These tasks can be time-consuming and often involve a steep learning curve for specific technical skills. The ADO can reduce or eliminate this burden so that researchers can focus on analysis and interpretation.
If you're a researcher embarking on a new project and are considering the potential support that the ADO could provide, we're here to help. Read our Researchers' Guide to Working with Digital Observatory to understand how you can use our services.
You can reach out to us directly via email (see Contact us), fill out our enquiry form, visit us during our joint office hours, or subscribe to our newsletter.
We offer a diverse catalogue of tools, datasets, documentation, and services that aim to assist researchers with the time-consuming tasks of exploring, collecting, tidying and modelling, storing and organising, analysing, and publishing data that might require specific technical skills. Below are some of our featured sources.
A full list of ADO resoures can be found here.
The Australian Twittersphere is a longitudinal, curated collection of tweets from approximately 838,000 Twitter accounts identified as ‘Australian’. The Digital Observatory has maintained reliable, ongoing data collection since early 2018, with approximately 22 million tweets being collected per month. There is also an archive of approximately 2 billion tweets from 2006 to 2016. The Digital Observatory currently collects approximately 41 million tweets per month.
As human lives are becoming more digitised now than ever, we see new forms of data, especially social media data and streaming data, increasingly incorporated in research endeavours. While there are standard practices regarding dealing with traditional research data, no such standards exist for these human-related dynamic digital data. This calls for a new data governance framework to guide researchers or anyone working with digital data.
youte is a command-line tool that collects and tidies YouTube video metadata and comments from YouTube Data API v.3. At the moment, the tool supports collecting public data that does not require OAuth 2.0.
This project is done in collaboration with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC).
