ethnograph-view
Digital ethnography is the practice of observing and analysing people’s interactions in online environments — such as forums, social media groups, and game communities — to understand their culture and behaviour. This project aims to develop a user-friendly, browser-based tool that supports this process for students, social scientists, and journalists.
Goals for this project
- Collect data ethically: enable users to link/upload text, images, and interaction data (messages etc) from specified online communities. Potentially and automated method for importing (using APIs or scraping techniques) could be included as well.
- Organise content: Store gathered material in a structured database with tagging for themes, dates, and sources. Analyse patterns: Use natural language processing (NLP) to detect frequent keywords, sentiment, and interaction networks.
- Visualise insights: Present findings as charts, timelines, and network diagrams to reveal how conversations and topics evolve.
- Have clearly stated and explained ethical and privacy guidelines for users. The student will design the architecture, implement data pipelines, integrate basic NLP models, and create an interactive dashboard.
Beyond programming, the project involves applying ethical research principles, handling data responsibly, and designing for non-technical users. By the end, the project will demonstrate how computer science can bridge technology and social research — turning raw online interactions into meaningful cultural insights.
Requirements
Ubuntu / Debian
sudo apt install libpq-dev python3-dev
Arch
sudo pacman -S postgresql-libs postgresql