Concept and challenges of a social media observatory as a DIY research infrastructure

Abstract

This article describes the basic concept, ethical and legal considerations, technical implementation as well as resulting tools and data collections of the Social Media Observatory (SMO). Since 2020, the SMO is developed as an open science research infrastructure within the Research Institute Social Cohesion (RISC) in Germany. It focuses on (the support of) long-term monitoring of public communication on selected platforms and online news media to answer social science-related research questions. Based on systematically compiled lists of public speaker categories, such as parliamentarians or media organizations, it collects statistics as well as content data to study the German social media discourse in comparison to mass media. Aggregated results are published via interactive dashboards. Raw data is published as ID lists for reproduction or shared with researchers upon request. Following a do-it-yourself approach to infrastructure, the SMO further provides various tools, curated datasets, and documented workflows, for instance, to run thematic ad-hoc data collections. As a main feature, it maintains a curated knowledge base in wiki format to enable other researchers to perform systematic social media observations on their own.