The 4CAT Capture & 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.

In 4CAT, you create a dataset from a given platform according to a given set of parameters; the result of this (usually a CSV or JSON 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:

The following platforms are supported through Zeeschuimer, with which you can collect data to import into 4CAT for analysis:

It is also possible to upload data collected with other tools as CSV files, or media files (audio, video and images). The following tools are explicitly supported but other data can also be uploaded as long as it is formatted as CSV or in a common media file format:

A number of other platforms have built-in support that is untested, or requires e.g. special API access.

Here is a list of 4CAT-related resources:

General reference information

For all users

There is currently no public 4CAT server that we can offer access to. The links in this list more or less assume that you have access to a 4CAT server that is run by e.g. your university. You can also run 4CAT yourself; see the list at the bottom of the page for the relevant links.

For advanced users

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