King's College London

KingsCAT is an instance of the open source 4CAT: Capture and Analysis Toolkit set up with support from the King’s College London Research Infrastructure Fund to support interdisciplinary and collaborative social media research.

Deployed at dozens of universities around the world, 4CAT provides an accessible interface for gathering and analysing collections of data from platforms such as Douyin, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tiktok, Twitter/X, Tumblr, YouTube and Weibo.

KingsCAT is a cross-faculty initiative coordinated by the Digital Future Institute’s Centre for Digital Culture in collaboration with e-Research and colleagues from multiple institutes and centres (King’s Digital Lab, King’s Business School, King's Policy Institute, Centre for Data Futures, African Leadership Centre, The Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, and The Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication), as well as departments and schools (Population Health Sciences, War Studies, English, Inflammation Biology, Geography, Digital Humanities, Marketing, Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Immunology & Microbial Sciences and Culture, Media & Creative Industries).

Previously researchers have used 4CAT in the context of research grants, publications, external collaborations, PhD projects and teaching activities. For example, for King’s researchers 4CAT played an important role in a REF impact case study on viral misinformation, a UKRI project on COVID-19 conspiracy theories, a NERC funded project mapping the politics of nature-based solutions, a multi-institutional collaboration on COVID-19 testing, ESRC/CHANSE and AHRC funded projects on conspiracy theories, and an H2020 project on forest restoration.

It also played a crucial role in external research collaborations and impact activities with media and civil society organisations such as the European Journalism Centre, Global Witness, Media Matters for America, Politico, Britain’s East and South East Asian Network (besea.n), Surrey Wildlife Trust and the European Forest Institute.