A research study was proposed to investigate how public engagement, education, and debate about Critical Race Theory (CRT) change the concept's meaning over time, tracking how CRT morphed from an academic theory to a controversial concept in the public sphere.
The study required data collated from multiple platforms, including Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, and scholarly citation databases. The Digital Observatory implemented custom data collection from all of these platforms via their official APIs.
Twitter and Reddit: All tweets and submissions matching critical race theory or CRT were captured.
Wikipedia: Content revisions on the Critical Race Theory page were collected from Wikipedia API, including the time when revision was made and what was revised.
Scholarly citations: All scholarly articles related to Critical Race Theory were collected via OpenAlex and further processed into a format suitable for the construction of a network graph.
Findings from this project were presented at a QUT Early Career Researcher Symposium.
"The Digital Observatory team has been core to the success of my research. The team has demonstrated a solid knowledge of Humanities and Social Science research through their ethical treatment of data but also in their ability to help me shape broad sociological and historical research questions that match the available data extraction technologies. Their partnership with my research agenda has enabled me to visualise the dynamics of education politics over two studies.
These findings will add to current understandings of digital citizenship and online debate as well as inform education policy and politics of the influence of social media. This impact would not have been possible without my research partnership with the Digital Observatory team."
