We are a facility within Queensland University of Technology's Research Infrastructure (QUT RI) portfolio dedicated to supporting research into public discourse on important societal issues. Our unique fusion of computational/data expertise and understanding of the Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) allows us to provide cost-effective and bespoke research project support. Our team has a track record of acquiring and supporting successful grants, giving your project a competitive advantage.
The computational and governance methods required to use and manage human-related data can be daunting to researchers. We streamline these process for researchers, providing ready-to-analyse data, analytics, and guidance on digital data practices and methodology.
Design and implement project-specific research data workflows
Assist with collecting, storing, and tidying data from the web
Build and maintain open-source and bespoke software to aid with data collection
Assist with data tidying, pre-processing, analysis, and visualisation
Assist with text analysis methods including topic modelling, sentiment analysis, network analysis, and AI-augmented qualitative analysis
Build and maintain open-source and bespoke software to aid with data processing and analysis
Provide curated data from our databanks including the Australian Twittersphere and NewsTalk
Provide guidance and advice on data governance associated with human-related data from the web (e.g. reviews, comments, forums, social media data)
The DO also provides an ecosystem of public resources and services that enable research including datasets and data exploration tools, training and workshops, research consultation and support, and open-source software utilities.
The Digital Observatory started as the Australian Digital Observatory, an ARDC platform working to establish national infrastructure to support researchers, especially in the humanities.
If you're a researcher embarking on a new project and are considering the potential support that the DO can provide, we're here to help. Read our Researchers' Guide to Working with Digital Observatory to understand how you can use our services.
We offer a diverse catalogue of tools, datasets, documentation, and services that aim to assist researchers with time-consuming tasks of exploring, collecting, tidying and modelling, storing and organising, analysing, and data that might require specific technical skills. Below are some of our featured sources.
AusReddit is a research databank of Reddit posts and comments from Australian-related subreddits. The goal is to provide academic researchers with easy access to a rich data source that can give rich insights into Australia's societal issues. As of March 2026, the databank contains more than 6.7 million submissions and more than 131 million comments from 590 subreddits.
The Australian Twittersphere is a longitudinal, curated collection of tweets from approximately more than 1 million Twitter accounts identified as ‘Australian’. The Digital Observatory maintained reliable, ongoing data collection from early 2018, with approximately 22-41 million tweets collected per month. The collection was ceased on 30 June 2023, following changes to Twitter's API. The rules which identify the population of accounts in the Australian Twittersphere are available as open 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.
The Digital Observatory (DO) has been collaborative and proactive in meeting with the Office of Research Ethics and Integrity (OREI) to discuss topics concerning the collection and analysis of human data from social media platforms and have provided advice for data specific queries from researchers, that have arisen during study design and ethics application preparation.
This is amazing! This has incredible applications for us here in DMRC, and indeed for so many communication and media scholars. As you're surely aware, and no doubt spurred you in developing this, the current Python and other libraries and approaches (GDELT, etc.) are incredibly limited in our neck of the woods, and in what they capture. I can think of at least a dozen students, postdocs and other faculty here who have immediate need for a support tool like this.
Everyone at the Digital Observatory is always so proactive and helpful when I cross paths with them. It's such a pleasure to work with you.
The Digital Observatory were a pleasure to work with. Very helpful in scoping out my research project and responsive to my needs, ensuring the research question I was exploring was answered. For any researcher considering using social media data, I would recommend getting in contact.
