GESIS Guides

GESIS Guides to Digital Behavioral Data (DBD)

GESIS Guides to Digital Behavioral Data (GESIS Guides to DBD) is a service that offers expertise and structured overviews on digital behavioral data and the computational methods needed for successfully working with these data.

The areas covered are the collection and acquisition of digital behavioral data, the pre-processing and analysis of digital behavioral data, data quality and research ethics. Guide formats are conceived to be modular and range from short checklists to more comprehensive introductions and overviews. : The GESIS Guides to DBD add up to a knowledge box that is open for use to researchers from all disciplines and does not require deep technical skills. However, they can contain lines of code and outlink to datasets for training or executable notebooks.

Our first guides are available during 2024. They will be complemented by more technical and in-depth method tutorials via our new Methods Hub later and are part of our broader efforts in computational social science capacity building.


General and across topics


What is Digital Behavioral Data? (519 kB)

What is Computational Reproducibility? (361 kB)

Expert Insights into Social Media and Democracy. An Interview with Philipp Lorenz-Spreen (297 kB)

Overview of Large Language Models for Social and Behavioral Scientists (470 kB) previous 1.0 version (436 kB)

How to Find and Explore Data Quality Frameworks for Digital Behavioral Data (450 kB)

What is Prompting? (0.93 MB)

Overview of Adapters for Tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) (785 kB) 
 

Meet the Experts-Talks

A Short Introduction to Computational Social Science and Digital Behavioral Data  Talk Slides (2.55 MB)

Digital Traces of Human Behavior from Online Platforms – Research Designs and Error Sources  Talk Slides (4.16 MB)

Auditing Algorithms: How Platform Technologies Shape our Digital Environment  Talk Slides (4.37 MB)

Combining Survey Data and Digital Behavioral Data  Talk Slides (3.39 MB)

Large Language Models as a Source of New Data: Methods and Challenges  Talk Slides (2.25 MB)
 


Data Collection


Overview of Approaches for Collecting Data from Online Platforms (393 kB)

Overview of Working with Data from YouTube (701 kB)

Expert Insights into Collecting Data with Mobile Applications. An Interview with Lukas Otto and Mareike Wieland (332 kB)

Expert Insights into Crowdsourcing and Studying Human Coordination. An Interview with Mark E. Whiting (344 kB)

How to Collect Web Data via APIs (383 kB)

How to Collect Online Data through Web Scraping (387 kB)

How to Collect Data from Dynamic Websites with Selenium (374 kB)

How to Collect Data with the YouTube Data API (829 kB)

How to Collect Search Trend Data from Google (353 kB)

How to Set up and Monitor App-based Data Collections (486 kB)

Overview of Working with Web Tracking Data (432 kB)
 

Meet the Experts-Talks

Introduction to Online Data Acquisition  Talk Slides (6.41 MB)

The German Federal Election: Social Media Data for Scientific (Re-)Use  Talk Slides (2.92 MB)

Collecting and Providing Web Data for the Social Sciences  Talk Slides (5.85 MB)

Utilizing Mobile Technology to Uncover Intra-individual Processes and Situational Dynamics  Talk Slides (4.62 MB)
 


Data Processing and Analysis


Expert Insights into Concepts of Network Analysis. An Interview with David Schoch (288 kB)

Expert Insights into Analyzing Images from Political Online Communication. An Interview with Cody Buntain (352 kB)

Expert Insights into Studying Misinformation with Natural Language Processing Methods. An Interview with Arkaitz Zubiaga (269 kB)

Expert Insights into Digital Behavioral Data for Health Analytics. An Interview with Sanja Šćepanović (354 kB)
 

Meet the Experts-Talks

Introduction to Online Data Acquisition  Talk Slides (6.41 MB)

The German Federal Election: Social Media Data for Scientific (Re-)Use  Talk Slides (2.92 MB)

Collecting and Providing Web Data for the Social Sciences  Talk Slides (5.85 MB)

Utilizing Mobile Technology to Uncover Intra-individual Processes and Situational Dynamics  Talk Slides (4.62 MB)
 


Data Management and Ethics 


Expert Insights into Studying Vulnerable Communities Online. An Interview with Kyriaki Kalimeri and Yelena Mejova (393 kB)

Expert Insights into Fairness Issues in Computational Social Science Research. An Interview with Allison Koenecke (265 kB)

Overview of Ethical Considerations when Working with Digital Behavioral Data (421 kB)
 

Meet the Experts-Talks

Research Ethics and Data Protection in Social Media Research  Talk Slides (3.31 MB)

Introduction to Domain-specific Data Infrastructures: DP-R|EX  Talk Slides (1.16 MB)
 

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