Cactool is an easy way to collaboratively code social media posts and visual media for manual content and discourse analysis
Cactool is a platform for easy human-coding of social media content for content analysis. It was designed from the bottom up for researchers who want to code social media content, but don’t need the analytical tools of other platforms – with easy import and exporting of data.
The platform easily lets you contextually analyse a list of social media posts in their native form. Simply import a CSV that contains a list of social media posts (such as collected through NodeXL or other scraping services); another to set your questions; and optionally set user logins, and the platform will do the rest – proving you with an easy to use human-coding platform.
Cactool was deigned after one of the creators grew frustrated with how content analysis of social media content was being undertaken. Traditionally, content was collected from Twitter or other formats, scraped, then placed into an Excel spreadsheet for manual coding of the tweets texts. This was obviously frustrating for those wishing to collect and analyse visual data. In addition, such an approach decontextualised the content, removing the content from the styling of the platform.
Cactool was designed to get around some of these limitations, while offering researchers a free alternative to expensive commercial products.
Cactool works for across multiple-social media platforms. The following data types are currently supported:
The project’s Principle Investigator is Dr Liam McLoughlin, Lecturer in Media & Communication at the University of Liverpool, and development was undertaken by Sam Ezeh
Cactus image created by catalyststuff on Freepik
Cactool Development was funded by the University of Liverpool’s Research Development and Initiative Fund (RDIF).