Keywords
ethnography, nlp, datasets, cultural

Technologies
flask, react, nlp, celery, pandas

Online communities produce more discussion than any researcher could manually read through. This project is an attempt to make that volume of data actually useful, it is a web-based tool that helps social scientists and digital ethnographers analyse large-scale online conversations without drowning in them.

The system can pull discussion data from Reddit, YouTube, and Boards.ie, processes it through a set of NLP techniques including emotion detection, named entity recognition, and topic clustering, and presents the results through an interactive dashboard. Researchers can explore linguistic patterns, emotional tone, participation habits, and how users interact with each other over time.

The goal was not to replace digital ethnography, but to give researchers a better starting point. A Cork-based dataset drawn from r/Cork, r/Ireland, YouTube, and Boards.ie was used to test and develop the system throughout. It turns out Cork people have a lot to say online.