digitalmethodsinitiative/4cat repository overview

⁠4CAT: Capture and Analysis Toolkit

4CAT is a research tool that can be used to analyse and process data from online social platforms. Its goal is to make the capture and analysis of data from these platforms accessible to people through a web interface, without requiring any programming or web scraping skills. Our target audience is researchers, students and journalists interested using Digital Methods in their work.

Learn more here about 4CAT on our website⁠ or in the academic paper by Stijn Peeters and Sal Hagen⁠ and here about the Digital Methods Initiative⁠, some of our other tools⁠, and various publications⁠.

If you would like to contribute to this open source project, please visit our GitHub repository for more information⁠.

⁠Tag overview

• The latest tag is automatically updated whenever a change is made to our master branch on GitHub. This allows us to quickly push new features and test them, but can sometimes have bugs.
• Numbered release tags (e.g. v1.29) are tested to the best of our ability and represent larger changes to 4CAT.
• The stable tag is a updated with a copy of the latest release and can be used to allow users to easily ensure they only use the latest stable release of 4CAT.

⁠4CAT Description

In 4CAT, you create a dataset from a given platform according to a given set of parameters; the result of this (usually a CSV file containing matching items) can then be downloaded or analysed further with a suite of analytical 'processors', which range from simple frequency charts to more advanced analyses such as the generation and visualisation of word embedding models.

4CAT has a (growing) number of supported data sources corresponding to popular platforms that are part of the tool, but you can also add additional data sources⁠ using 4CAT's Python API. The following data sources are currently supported actively:

• 4chan
• 8kun
• Bitchute
• Parler
• Reddit
• Telegram
• Twitter API (Academic and regular tracks)

The following platforms are supported through other tools, from which you can import data into 4CAT for analysis:

• Facebook (via CrowdTangle⁠ exports)
• Instagram (via CrowdTangle)
• TikTok (via Zeeschuimer⁠ or tiktok-scraper⁠)

A number of other platforms have built-in support that is untested, or requires e.g. special API access. You can view the data sources in our wiki⁠ or review list of data sources code⁠ in the GitHub repository.