QUT’s Digital Observatory (DO) enables understanding of the complex and dynamic digital landscape. We provide access to reliable and scalable state-of-the-art research data infrastructure, data engineering and data science services for researchers and project partners. Our ability to manage large sets of dynamic digital data enables innovative research, with applications across a range of fields. Our team builds trusted platforms that make it possible to collect data responsibly, ethically and securely. We have secured an ethics approval to operate as a databank and act as custodian to the datasets we collect.

The Digital Observatory can provide either raw data or data analysed in a way that is relevant to the research question and able to be interpreted by the researcher.

Data analysis services include (but are not limited to):

• descriptive analysis (eg. high-level context of Twitter data including hashtags, account mentions, links shared, images shared, and interactions between accounts)
• detailed analysis and grouping/coding of hashtags, mentions and links shared into categories for further analysis (augmenting qualitative analysis with quantitative methods enabling larger amounts of data to be analysed qualitatively)
• topic modelling on tweet text (eg. qualitative analysis of large quantities of text)
• sentiment analysis (eg. categorising positive, negative or neutral content)
• co-hashtag analysis (eg. use of hashtags together)
• retweet and mention network construction and analysis (eg. who is talking to who)
• networked coordinated behaviour analysis (eg. coordinated actions between accounts).

Data collection services include:

• user population tweet collection
• small scale follower/followee network collection
• prospective search/streaming based collection
• user population identification
• web data archiving and processing (ie. scraping).

Data-related services include:

• project consultation (eg. monthly sessions for six months to discuss your project with the Digital Observatory and obtain specialist advice)
• professional services (eg. data scientist, software developer) for grants eg. 0.1 FTE for one year.