The Digital Observatory offers a diverse catalogue of tools, datasets, documentation, and services from all partner institutions and infrastructures to support the research communities. The goal of these resources is to assist researchers through the time-consuming tasks of exploring, collecting, tidying and modelling, storing and organising, analysing, and publishing data that might require specific technical skills.
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 28 August 2024, the databank contains more than 4.9 million submissions and nearly 100 million comments from 593 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.
NewsTalk is an aggregator of reader commentary on the majority of Australian news websites. We also harvest Reddit comment threads linking Australian news stories. This provides good coverage of the Australian news landscape even when publishers don't support on-site reader comments.
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.
