Meet the Experts: Collecting and Providing Web Data for the Social Sciences

Social scientists increasingly use digital behavioral (DBD) data. Collecting and processing such data is typically associated with a set of practical/methodological, ethical, and legal challenges. Resources for large-scale or continuous DBD collections of DBD are often not available to individual researchers or small(er) projects. As a research infrastructure institute, GESIS can engage in such efforts. These are implemented in the new service Web Data for the Social Sciences which has three key components:

1) Data Collection: Continuous or time-limited topical data collections from different platforms;

2) Data Offers: Created based on the collections and made accessible to the community;

3) Community Engagement.

The first two new collections are a continuous crawl of Telegram channels and a comprehensive collection web data from various sources data from the German candidates for the 2024 European Parliament election. In this talk, we will introduce the new service and present the two first data collections.

Presenters:
Dr. Johannes Breuer
Dr. Dimitar Dimitrov