Here is a list of external resources that might be of interest
On this page you can find a list of external resources helpful for data collection and data analysis.
Zeeschuimer (Social media data collection)
Want to systematically collect data from various social media platforms? Zeeschuimer is your friend. It provides an easy to use browser extension (only Firefox), which will collect data from various feeds and public accounts across on a variety of platforms. You activate the browser extension and then start scrolling and Zeeschuimer will data on collect posts and/or comments that you are viewing in your browser.
Installation: Find the open source code on github. Go to Installation -> Releases. Under releases select the newest .xpi file and download it. Click on the downloaded file and the extension should automatically be installed to your Firefox browser.
Platforms covered by Zeeschuimer:
- TikTok (posts and comments)
- Instagram (posts only)
- X/Twitter
- 9gag
- Imgur
- Douyin
- Gab
- Truth Social
- RedNote/Xiaohongshu
Gephi is the leading visualization and exploration software for all kinds of graphs and networks. Gephi is open-source and free and runs on Mac, Windows or Linux. You can also try the browser based version for smaller projects Gephi Lite.
Wordij (Semantic Network Tools)
WORDij is a family of various programs designed to automate content analysis a substantial amount. In other words; you feed Wordij a text file, and it analyzes the text. Wordij can analyse word cohesions and links, count frequently used words, extract proper nouns, ontologies and more. The software runs on Windows 32-bit and 64-bit, Mac 32-bit and 64-bit, and Linux 64-bit OS. Files analyzed are in UTF-8 (or UTF-16) format, so the programs can handle languages with graphic characters such as Chinese or Russian. WORDij output files, 8 per run, enable importation of files into a number of other network analyusis programs, such as UCINET, NodeXL, Pajek, Negopy, and others. WORDij is free for non-commercial academic research. Commercial licensing is available.
OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) is a powerful tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data. In other words; if you have messy data, Open Refine can help to clean it up. It works only with structured data though, so for instance imagine a spreadsheet, where you have a column with adresses. Sometimes an adress is mentioned “This is where it is at 1” sometimes it is mentioned as “This_is_where_it_is_at_one”. Open Refine can analyze and identify that these two adresses are probably the same.
DMI Toolbase
Not so much a single tool but more of a collection of various tools for gathering or working with data.