Working with YouTube comments in Machines of Knowledge

One type of data with which you may want to work as part of the Machines of Knowledge course in the Master Digital Cultures, or in your MA thesis, are comments scraped from YouTube.

Please consult the information on the Datascraping YouTube page to learn about the opportunities and challenges of using this data source. The page also explain how to scrape the comments using Python and the Google API for YouTube.

Furter Readings

These texts link the technical practice of scraping YouTube comments with the broader understanding of comment sections as spaces of participatory culture and sites of digital interaction.

• Bou-Franch, P., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2014). Conflict management in massive polylogues: A case study from YouTube. Journal of Pragmatics, 73, 19–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.05.001
• Fuchs, C., Hofkirchner, W., Schafranek, M., Raffl, C., Sandoval, M., & Bichler, R. (2010). Theoretical foundations of the web: Cognition, communication, and co-operation. Towards an understanding of Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. Future Internet, 2(1), 41–59. https://doi.org/10.3390/fi2010041
• Morozov, E. (2011). The net delusion: The dark side of internet freedom. PublicAffairs.
• Rotman, D., Golbeck, J., & Preece, J. (2009). The community is where the rapport is: On sense and structure in the YouTube community. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T ’09),41–50. https://doi.org/10.1145/1556460.1556467