In this workshop, lead developer Stijn Peeters introduces participants to the widely used 4CAT Capture and Analysis Toolkit for social media research. This toolkit, together with its companion browser plugin, Zeeschuimer, enables researchers to easily capture and analyse data from social media platforms through a web interface, without requiring programming skills. This open-source tool also supports visual, textual, network and statistical analyses of datasets from platforms such as Douyin, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tiktok, Twitter/X, Tumblr, YouTube and Weibo. The workshop also discusses findings and insights one can generate from such datasets, as well as some of the challenges inherent to this approach to social media analysis. Interested workshop participants can sign up for KingsCAT, an instance of this tool available for researchers at King’s, which is in the process of being set up.

This event is co-organised by the Digital Future Institute’s Centre for Digital Culture and the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London.

Speaker's info:

Stijn Peeters is assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, Department of Media Studies, and technical director of the Digital Methods Initiative, a leading European research group for internet research. His work focuses on the development of methods for the analysis of social media, and the study of online subcultures. He is additionally the lead developer of the widely used social media research tools 4CAT and Zeeschuimer.