Australian Digital Observatory (ADO)

The Challenge

Social media is a rich source of data for researchers from many disciplines. However, researchers face multiple barriers to incorporating these data into their research, including ensuring data quality, technical data pre-processing, and accessing advanced analytical tools. 

Social media datasets are also dynamic with new content arriving constantly, making storage and analysis complex.

The Response

For a number of years, many groups across Australia have independently collected significant social media holdings to serve their local research community. 

The Australian Digital Observatory (ADO) project aimed to sustainably align and connect these established platforms into a national infrastructure that supports a diverse array of research communities. 

Researchers will be able to access and analyse dynamic digital data including existing collections of national interest across Twitter, FlickR, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram and gaming platforms such as Steam.

A databank has been built from the existing partner infrastructures for the collection of dynamic digital data (including but not limited to social media data), improving accessibility to Australian researchers. 

The ADO has also developed and is supporting an ecosystem of hosted platforms, tools, methods and workflows. This ecosystem intends to both enable researchers to access databank data and support researchers’ own collections and analytical pipelines. 

The ADO is offering targeted data collection capabilities and mediated access to our curated data collection. Data modelling is also being offered, as well as data analysis and visualisation such as topic modelling and sentiment analysis. 

This ecosystem is underpinned by the FAIR data principles, data governance, open source software principles and the collective knowledge of a community of practice.

The Partners

• QUT
• University of Melbourne 
• University of New South Wales
• The University of Queensland 
• QCIF