The Accelerator was created to help researchers more efficiently and effectively study the information environment. The process of developing the tools to do that has been guided by extensive feedback from our community of researchers and technologists, including a joint scoping effort and a detailed survey of more than 100 researchers and professionals to better understand the challenges they face in their work. These collective efforts have been essential to the build of the tools that are currently being beta tested.
As we get closer to releasing our tools more widely, we interviewed Kevin Greene, an academic research manager in the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project at Princeton University, to find out how the Accelerator’s typical activity dashboard could help researchers like him do their work more efficiently, as well as what features he would like to see.
The typical activity dashboard meets researchers’ demand for a way to easily visualize trends and patterns in the information environment. It compiles data from multiple social media platforms, which not only saves researchers time, but also illuminates important dynamics in the origin and spread of content. Researchers are able to go deep and wide, with the ability to glean high-level insights and filter and re-filter without losing access to their original dataset.
“Instead of spending hours or a day gathering decent data or running a decent analysis, you can get a representative assessment of something immediately,” Greene summarized. “It makes it a lot faster to go from a hunch or a conjecture to an assessment.”
Greene emphasized the value of being able to quickly gather data based on keywords and explore measures of engagement (e.g., shares, emoji reactions, discussions) and patterns related to the time of day when content was posted. The dashboard also breaks down the content of posts, providing insight into the use of text, images, and videos. “There’s so much work to be done around images, and it gets second class treatment a lot of times, so this is really useful,” Greene said.
The tool fills critical gaps left by existing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which often go un-used among researchers due to inadequate infrastructure or overly complicated data access rules. For example, the dashboard tracks posts that are deleted by platforms and users, which is something existing APIs don’t provide. “This leaves researchers in the dark about what data has been lost. In a world where APIs only show the live version, this tool changes the game for researchers.”
In addition to our existing beta testing, we will continue to elicit feedback from our researcher community and look forward to releasing the dashboard, along with other tools, later this year.