The Digital Observatory (DO) is a interdisciplinary team of data scientists, software developers, and academics within Queensland University of Technology's Research Infrastructure portfolio dedicated to supporting research into public discourse on important societal issues. The DO focuses on establishing and maintaining infrastructure to support a diverse array of researchers from all institutions in accessing and working with dynamic digital data, including existing collections of national interest.
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 DO also provides an ecosystem of 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 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.
