Communalytic, computational social science research tool for studying online communities and discourse, developed and maintained by researchers at the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University. It can collect and analyze publicly available data from Bluesky, CrowdTangle (FB/IG), Mastodon, Reddit, Telegram, X/Twitter, and YouTube, or you can import your own CSV or JSON data files – No coding required.
Gephi, open-source software for visualizing and analysing large networks graphs. Gephi uses a 3D render engine to display graphs in real-time and speed up the exploration. You can use it to explore, analyse, spatialise, filter, cluterize, manipulate and export all types of graphs.
Voyant, an open-source, web-based application for text analysis. It supports scholarly reading and interpretation of texts or corpora. I find it useful to get a 'feel' of the data – text density, most frequently used words, most active users, and collocates. Voyant allows users to integrate interpretation into texts "by creating hermeneutica—small embeddable “toys” that can be woven into essays published online or into such online writing environments as blogs or wikis", say the developers of Voyant Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair in this paper.
YouTube Data Tools, a collection of simple tools for extracting data from the YouTube platform via the YouTube API v3, developed and managed by Bernhard Rieder, an associate professor in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam.
MAXQDA Analytics Pro, mixed-method data analysis tool for diverse datasets. It works with a wide range of data types and offers advanced coding, retrieval, transcription and visualization, while still being easy to learn and use. I used it to annotate websites and look for patterns in my PhD thesis. The 2024 version has a new beta AI assist—so far, I find the 'suggest codes' feature the most useful. If you go to ICA conferences, MAXQDA representatives are usually around.
Octoparse, no-coding solution for web scraping to turn pages into structured data within clicks.
More social media analysis tools from Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University are listed here.