Updates on ICPSR's Social Media Archive (SOMAR)

Social media are implicated in many of contemporary society’s most pressing issues, from influencing public opinion, to organizing social movements, to identifying economic trends. Increasing the capacity of researchers to understand the dynamics of such phenomena will depend on reliable, curated, discoverable and accessible social media data. The technical and financial costs of retrieving, managing, and analyzing this data directly from social media platforms are prohibitive for many researchers. A federated archive of curated datasets, workflows, and code for use by researchers for the empirical analysis of social media platforms, content, and user behavior would alleviate many of the technical and financial challenges to using this data to advance scientific discovery. This presentation introduces a prototype social media archive (SOMAR) that federates researchers’ data to create a resource for conducting data-intensive research using data from social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram. We will demonstrate SOMAR’s core features and discuss future plans for its development.