Yet Another Computational HASS Tool for the Mobile Investigation of Platforms

Yet Another Computational HASS Tool for the Mobile Investigation of Platforms or yacht-mip is a relatively easy to use tool for researchers to annotate social posts into a research database from a mobile phone. For the uninitiated, HASS stands for Humanities and Social Sciences.

yacht-mip is designed to act as a mid-level technical solution that provides lightweight automation for researchers studying social platforms by creating a quick way to select and code social data. yacht-mip works by allowing a research participant or researcher to easily share posts from social media platforms into a research database and to conduct qualitative coding on the fly, then making data accessible for analysis using either pandas or by exporting to spreadsheets.

yacht-mip is currently in development, and is internally functional, however the current public release is not functional. The current release has been made in order to snapshot the project in its current form for posterity. 

The project development page and full instructions can be followed on Github. The current page will be updated with a new version when a full release is available.

yacht-mip relies on Telegram in order to operate, and all users will need an account in order to contribute or receive data. Telegram does have spammy bots, so I recommend hardening your accounts against spam after signup.

yacht-mip only provides mild automation. It is not a tool for researchers wanting to grab arbitrary data at scale. It has no crawlers in place. If you are a looking for a research tool for scalar study of platforms I recommend starting with SMAT-APP, which is very easy to use.

yacht-mip is not intended for gathering data about individual users, although could be repurposed in order to achieve such goals through modification of various ships.

yacht-mip also includes a web snapshot tool that can capture some data from certain websites, currently listed in the repository's ships folder.

Because of these potentials, a project lead should ensure that their research project is compliant with all relevant institutional policies and obligations covering research ethics, such as IRBs, HERCs, and similar.