Welcome to the GESIS Web Data

The service GESIS Web Data acts as an umbrella for different activities around collecting digital behavioral data from the Web, especially from online platforms, including social media. It serves as an entry point to long-term samples from specific platforms (such as Twitter or Telegram) and additional data offers specifically prepared to enable research on current topics of societal relevance, or acute events. In general, the selection of platforms and topics is based on their relevance for social science research, technical feasibility, legal and ethical considerations, and community input.

We are continuously working on collecting different types of data from various web platforms. Current examples are a continuous crawl of Telegram channels and a collection of social media and other web data from the German candidates for the 2024 European Parliament election. Datasets from both collections have already been published.

A Longitudinal Dataset for Aggregated User Interactions and Information Dissemination on Telegram

Social media activities of the German candidates

A Knowledge Graph of Fact-Checked Claims (January, 2023)

An Annotated Collection of Tweets Outlining Strategies of Political Risk Communication during Global Crises (2018-2023)

Twitter accounts of candidates in the German federal election 2021 (GLES)

Political Campaigning on Twitter During the 2019 European Parliament Election Campaign

Another thematic collection is carried out analogous to the 2024 EU election for candidates for the German federal election in 2025.

GESIS Web Data consists of three components:

Data Collection
Continuous or time-limited topical data collections from different platforms

Data Offers
Specific data offers created from the different web data collections that are made accessible to the community.

Community Engagement
Community engagement activities, such as workshops, hackathons, and user surveys to capture user needs and feedback and provide support.

What are the benefits of this service for the social science research community?

There are several reasons why the service GESIS Web Data is valuable for the research community:

Independence from commercial third parties, whose interests do not necessarily align with open science principles and who may change access modalities at any point in time.
Continuous collections of Web data stream ensure that historic data is accessible on any emerging topic and that researchers do not have to rely on post-hoc data collection that can only start after a particular event or topic has been identified, in which case the collection of historic data may be deleted or constrained by platform APIs.
Resources for large scale and/or continuous collections of Web data are often not available to individual researchers or research projects (especially smaller ones). An infrastructure institute like GESIS, however, is able to preemptively carry out such tasks.
Persistence and long-term availability of data are a crucial requirement for reproducibility and reusability. Reproducibility and reusability are key features supported by relying on public data archives, where the used data is archived for research purposes and transparency about both, used data and the applied methods for retrieval, sampling, and interpretation can be ensured.

Team