In their open access article published in “Publizistik”, Gregor Wiedemann, Felix Victor Münch, Jan Philipp Rau, Phillip Kessling and Jan-Hinrik Schmidt write about the lessons learned from the establishment of the Social Media Observatory (SMO), an open science infrastructure for monitoring social media.
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Abstract
This article describes the foundations, ethical and legal considerations, technical implementation, and resulting tools and data collections of the Social Media Observatory (SMO). The SMO has been developed as an open science research infrastructure within the Research Institute for Social Cohesion (FGZ) since 2020. It focuses on the long-term observation of public communication on selected platforms and online news media to answer social science research questions. Based on systematically compiled lists of public spokesperson categories, such as parliamentarians or media organizations, both statistical and content data are collected to examine German social media discourse in comparison to editorial mass media. Aggregated results are published via interactive dashboards. Raw data will be published as ID lists for reproduction or shared with researchers upon request. Following a do-it-yourself approach, the SMO also provides various tools, curated datasets, and documented workflows to enable, for example, ad hoc thematic data collection. A key contribution is a curated knowledge base in wiki format to help other researchers get started with social media data.
Wiedemann, G.; Münch, F. V; Rau, J. P.; Kessling, P.; Schmidt, J.-H. (2023): Concept and Challenges of a Social Media Observatory as a DIY Research Infrastructure. Publizistik. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11616-023-00807-6