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in August, we published the first results of our analysis of 36M YouTube channels firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/…; the rise of Patreon was an important finding and the next project will look more deeply into how to study changing monetization practices through URLs

4CAT, our tool for analyzing forum-like platforms (made by Stijn Peeters and @SalHagen1) has added Twitter's API v2 to the already long list of data sources it supports.

For the first time ever, the authors of a disinformation study take their time to manually check whether the "social bots" determined using @botometer-voodoo are actually "social bots". Turns out, of course, that none of them are. academic.oup.com/jamia/advance-… /ht Adrian Rauchfleisch

great explainer on firstdraft for how to study misinformation networks on YouTube using the YouTube Data Tools firstdraftnews.org/long-form-arti…

📃 New blog post, 'Field Notes on Capturing Reddit data'. Hopefully the first in a series of notes on data capture techniques for various platforms! On the CAT4SMR blog ⬇️ cat4smr.humanities.uva.nl/index.php/2021…

Facebook’s attempts to shut down the NYU Ad Observatory means it’s time to have a conversation about how we ensure scholars, journalists and activists can hold the platforms responsible for their impacts on civic life: nature.com/articles/d4158…

Ever wonder how tech platforms actually moderate content? Check out @riederb and YarSk's fantastic paper out on algorithmic content moderation via Google's Platform API. buff.ly/3m09MTT

YouTube has started to hide the public dislike count on videos (progressive rollout). This data will also no longer be available via the API and research software like the YouTube Data Tools will no longer provide it. blog.youtube/news-and-event…

Starting now parallel sections of practical labs. On the research software track, Bernhard Rieder is introducing 4CAT by OILab & on the image analysis track, how to make visualizations w/ collections of images w @elena_aversa & Mattia Mertens of densitydesign #SMARTDataSprint

if you need to collect data from TikTok or Instagram, the Zeeschuimer plugin by Stijn Peeters creates structured datasets from your browsing session github.com/digitalmethods…

So the YouTube Data Tools are being audited by YouTube's API Operations Team. If you have a research or thesis project planned, I would gently suggest to collect your data sooner rather than later.

on May 23rd, we are organizing a workshop on data-driven social media analysis in Amsterdam, presenting 4CAT and the YouTube Data Tools, and discussing participants' research projects cat4smr.humanities.uva.nl/index.php/2022…

Newly published: the write-up of our tool 4CAT, which facilitates research with social media (big) data for without requiring programming/API knowledge on platforms including Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, Telegram, 4chan and more: 🔓computationalcommunication.org/ccr/article/vi…

my department (media studies UvA Amsterdam) is again hiring new Assistant Professors, including on OSINT (vacatures.uva.nl/UvA/job/Assist…), cultural data analysis (vacatures.uva.nl/UvA/job/Assist…), and visual media analysis (vacatures.uva.nl/UvA/job/Assist…)

The YouTube Data Tools' channel network works again after I discovered (much too late) that there is actually a new API endpoint for featured channels tools.digitalmethods.net/netvizz/youtub…

after reading the super interesting paper by dhiraj murthy on ISIS videos in YouTube recommendations (journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…), I added a "linksSeed" column to the YouTube Data Tools' video network to study how seeds are linked back to by discovered videos

Thank you so much to Sal Hagen, Digital Methods and OILab . Winter School 2020 introduced me to this wonderful tool, and finally we also have it up and running here at department for archivistics, library- and information science at OsloMet!

on May 8 (13:00-16:00) in Amsterdam, we are organizing another workshop on social media analysis with 4CAT and the YouTube Data Tools, more info here: cat4smr.humanities.uva.nl/index.php/2023…

Alette Schoon and Henri-Count Evans oriented the Winter School participants to the use of Digital Methods Initiative’s 4Cat. This open source tool scrapes and sorts data from social media platforms, such as TikTok, 4chan, Instagram and Tumblr. We ❤️ 4Cat #digimethods2023