DATA & RESOURCES

The CDMRN provides data and analysis expertise to members and the broader research community

MEO Insights Hub

From the Media Ecosystem Observatory

The MEO Insights Hub is a web application that facilitates researcher access to our datasets, fostering collaboration and enabling a broader community to benefit from shared research insights. Our datasets are regularly updated, and consist of social media data and metadata for thousands of politically influential Canadians.

Through the web interface, researchers can access not only the metadata-enriched seed lists of these politically influential Canadians, but also the millions of text captions, images, and videos that they have published via their social media accounts. Researchers can scroll through and filter content, visualize aggregations through interactive charts and network maps, and export tables or images for further analysis. 

As of now we track Canadian social media content on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube, with plans to add more platforms, aggregations, and filters, on a rolling basis. 

KEY FUNCTIONALITY

SEED LISTS VIEW: A tabulation of thousands of politically influential or notable Canadian individuals and organizations, along with metadata about them, and their social media accounts across all in-scope platforms.

All of our data collection at MEO begins with the generation of seed lists. A seed is an entity: either a person or an organization. We carefully curated seed lists of Canadian politicians, news media organizations, journalists, and social media influencers, who together shape Canadian political discourse.

For each seed in our lists, we recorded metadata – political party affiliation (if applicable), scope of news organization (local/national), and so forth. We also identified their social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Researchers can scroll through, filter, or export our seed lists via the web interface.

DATA VIEW: Interface that allows researchers to explore data, conduct searches, and visualize data timelines and word clouds for each platform.

Providing a responsive and user-friendly interface with filters based on metadata together with full-text search capabilities to slice data is very important for exploratory analysis.

The Data View lets researchers search through our different data collections and filter the results (e.g. by date intervals). Researchers can do a basic full-text search (e.g. “canada”) or can also use advanced options like searching by type (e.g. seed_type:news_outlet to filter data by categories of seed entities).

Results are displayed in three formats: 

  • help researchers to visualize the distribution of data over time based on their search criterias and filters. These timelines can be exported in different formats (csv, png, etc.)

  • Are useful to see all the content including the metadata. Researchers can decide which columns to show/hide and order by any column on data tables.

  • Are visualizations that provide a quick and intuitive way to identify prominent words within a text or dataset. By representing words in varying sizes based on their frequency, word clouds offer a succinct overview, making it easy to discern key themes or emphasis in the given content.

DASHBOARDS: A visual snapshot of key data and metrics, offering real-time insights and the ability to monitor and analyze important trends for each platform.

NETWORK ANALYSIS: A network visualization tool allowing researchers to gain insights into complex network structures through interactive and dynamic graphical representations.

Interested in using the tool?

Email alexei.abrahams@mcgill.ca if you’d like to request access.

Tools Offered By Our Partners

Partner: Social Media Lab, TMU
https://communalytic.org

Communalytic is a computational social science research tool for studying online communities and discourse. It can collect, analyze, and visualize publicly available data from various social media platforms including Reddit, Telegram, Twitter, and Facebook/ Instagram (via CrowdTangle), or from your own CSV or JSON files. 

There are two versions of Communalytic:

  • EDU and PRO. Communalytic EDU is designed to help students learn about social media data analytics.

  • Communalytic PRO is designed for the academic research community and is ideal for large-scale academic research projects. 

Partner: DisinfoWatch
https://disinfowatch.org/database/

DisinfoWatch’s database of COVID related misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, hoaxes and foreign propaganda. We use various tools to monitor and collect examples, which we then analyze and publish. By default, examples are sorted by date. RSS feed here.

Digital Democracy Institute Portal 

https://webapp.digitaldemocracies.org/

Partner: Digital Democracy Institute (DDI), Simon Fraser University

The Digital Democracy Institute portal includes tools for text and image scraping (twitter, instagram, discord), text and image clustering, authenticity marker annotating and sentiment classifier auditing.