Published on Wednesday 10 July 2024 by Boyd Nguyen
Last month, we had the opportunity to participate in the Post-API Conference 2024, organised by Prof. Dan Agnus, Prof. Deen Freelon, Associate Professor Jo Lukito, Dr. Jo Lukito, and Dr. John Pasek.
First held in Philadelphia in 2023, the Post-API Conference provides a platform for the research community to learn and share their experience working with social media data. As the name suggests, the conference focuses on acquiring social media data for research in an era where data access is becoming increasingly difficult.
As a research infrastructure facility primarily dealing with human data on the web such as social media data, the Digital Observatory has been exploring sustainable non-API approaches to data collection. For that reason, we were invited to talk about our tools and resources in this area.
The talk described our three newly established tools:
We also briefly mentioned TubeTalk, a future project that aims to transcribe with speaker diarisation YouTube videos.
The interest our talk generated was encouraging, and we had good conversations with researchers to better understand their research problems and needs.
It was also interesting to hear how other researchers approached data collection. As expected, we also discussed the ethical and legal implications of digital data acquisition.
