Abstract
This paper presents SciTok, a tool developed to facilitate social science and computer science researchers in the acquisition, exploration, and analysis of TikTok data. Despite TikTok’s burgeoning influence in public and scientific discourse, access to its data remains an unaddressed challenge, creating a void this study aims to fill. This research achieves its objectives by first defining a theoretical model of TikTok that integrates the perspectives of both social science and computer science, followed by the design and implementation of a web scraper adapted to this model. By making the tool user-friendly and ensuring that it is adapted to a common social science research framework, we seek to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and invite more extensive analysis of social media’s influence on social phenomena. Limitations and potential extensions for future research are also discussed, providing a groundwork for further explorations. (The tool can be accessed under: https://github.com/Lazel102/SciTok. For more details on this work, refer to the thesis corresponding to this paper [8]).
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Notes
- 1.
The robots.txt is a text file placed on a website’s server that instructs web robots or crawlers which pages or directories to access or avoid when indexing the site.
- 2.
For more information see https://neo4j.com.
- 3.
For more information see https://scrapy.org.
- 4.
For more information see https://www.docker.com.
- 5.
For more information see https://neo4j.com/developer/cypher/.
- 6.
For more information see https://www.kineviz.com.
- 7.
For more information see https://github.com/davidteather/TikTok-Api.
- 8.
For more information see https://musicbrainz.org.
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Zelle, Y., Grison, T., Feger, M. (2024). SciTok - A Web Scraping Tool for Social Science Research. In: Stephanidis, C., Antona, M., Ntoa, S., Salvendy, G. (eds) HCI International 2023 – Late Breaking Posters. HCII 2023. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1957. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49212-9_14
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