We are pleased to announce the release of the new YouTube comments data collector in Communalytic, a no-code computational social science research tool for studying online communities and discourse. With over 2 billion monthly users, this new data collector module will offer academic researchers with a systematic way to study public discourse on the world’s largest video-sharing website.
As noted in our State of Social Media Canada 2022 report, YouTube is the third most popular social media platform where 62% of online adults report having an account. Going beyond simple audience reactions to videos, YouTube comments can be a rich source of research data that can reveal insights into how social ties are maintained, how online communities are formed around shared ideas, how opinions are shaped, how people use YouTube videos for identity and meaning-making and more.
Researchers have used YouTube comments for studies ranging from offensive commenting to online perceptions of popular tourist destinations. The YouTube comments data collector joins other recently released data collection modules in Communalytic, such as the Telegram channels or groups data collector. Like our other no-code data collectors, the new YouTube comments data collector integrates seamlessly with Communalytic’s various built-in analytical modules such as sentiment analysis, toxicity analysis, topic analysis and network analysis. Along with videos id, the module also collects other metadata fields such as the date, author, text and like, etc…(See: YouTube data structure)
If you are interested in learning more, here are a few helpful links to get you started with YouTube research via Communalytic:
- How To Request a YouTube API key
- How to Collect Comments from a YouTube video
- Learn about YouTube data structure
Please note that to collect comments from YouTube, you will need to request a free YouTube API key. Also, following the YouTube API Services Developer Policies, your YouTube dataset will be automatically removed after 30 days from its collection date.
About Communalytic
Communalytic is a no-code 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, YouTube, Facebook/Instagram (via CrowdTangle) and Twitter, or from a user-uploaded CSV or JSON file.
Communalytic contains a suite of advanced data analytics modules including: a Toxicity Analyzer, a Sentiment Analyzer, a Topic Analyzer and a built-in Network Analyzer. These modules can be used to automatically:
- detect anti-social interactions (i.e., harassment, hate speech, extremist content, etc.),
- assess sentiments in online discourse,
- identify and group together social media posts that are semantically similar and identify latent topics within your dataset,
- generate and visualize various types of networks, including communication and link-sharing networks, which in turn can be used to identify influencers, map shared interests among online actors, study the spread of mis/dis-information and detect signs of possible coordination among seemingly disparate actors.
For more details, see Communalytic’s Tutorials page.