The Australian Digital Observatory: The Stories We Can Tell
Richard Sinnott1, Luca Morandini1, George Buchanan1, Sach Jayasinghe1, Marissa Takahashi, Daniel Angus1 1The University Of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Abstract
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 originally of interest included data from platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Foursquare, Reddit, YouTube and e-Gaming platforms such as Steam/Valve. Since then the core ADO platform has been established: ADOReD – Australian Digital Observatory Research Dashboard (https://www.ado.eresearch.unimelb.edu.au/) at The University of Melbourne. The ADOReD platform includes large-scale Cloud-based data harvesting from a subset of the aforementioned social media platforms (Twitter, Reddit, FlickR, Foursquare, YouTube). However given the disruptions to the social media landscape and especially Twitter with the take-over by Elon Musk in 2022, the platform now incorporates data from the open source Mastodon platform. This talk will cover the core functionality offered through ADOReD along with an exploration of the data it makes available. This includes data, aggregation, topic modelling, sentiment analysis and rich text-based querying capabilities.
The talk will also explore some of the technical challenges related to the Cloud infrastructure upon which ADOReD depends and the ramifications of dealing with truly big data.
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 450 peer reviewed publications across a range of applied computing research areas. He has used social media at scale for teaching for 10+ years. He has office of national security grants in the area of fake news.