Prof. Richard Sinnott1 Luca Morandini
1University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
The Australian Digital Observatory (ADO) was funded by ARDC in 2021 to support large-scale access to and use of social media data by Australian researchers. Examples of the social media data of interest include data from platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Foursquare, Reddit, YouTube and e-Gaming platforms such as Steam/Valve. Since then the first prototype of the core ADO platform has been established: ADOReD – Australian Digital Observatory Research Dashboard (https://www.ado.eresearch.unimelb.edu.au/dashboard/) with initial feedback garnered from early adopters. The ADOReD platform includes large-scale Cloud-based data harvesting from an initial selection of the aforementioned social media platforms. This platform provides the big picture of what is happening across the social media landscape of Australia and thus provides the pulse of what people are talking about and reacting to. The ADOReD platform currently includes a range of capabilities including:
- Aggregation of diverse social media data at scale including aggregation by: location, time, seasonality and language;
- Topic modelling including novel ways to see topics emerging over time and capabilities to identify targeted topic clusters;
- Term analysis to explore frequency of occurrence of specific terms (words) and associated terms over time;
- Capabilities to search and download references to content for topics of interest;
- Training materials for access and use of the platform and targeted collection of data;
This talk will cover the ADOReD platform and demonstrate its capabilities and the way in which it can be accessed and used by researchers
Biography:
Professor Richard O. Sinnott is Professor of Applied Computing Systems and Director of the Melbourne eResearch Group at the University of Melbourne. He has been lead software engineer/architect on an extensive portfolio of national and international projects, with specific focus on those research domains requiring finer-grained access control (security) and those dealing with big data challenges. He has over 400 peer reviewed publications across a range of applied computing research areas.