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) or fill out our enquiry form.
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.
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.
This project is done in collaboration with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC).
