The philosophy of the R package paperboy is that the package is a repository for webscraping scripts for
news media sites, with advanced features for quick data retrieval --- even for content behind log-ins or anti-scraping
measures. Many data scientists and researchers write their own code when they have to retrieve news media content
from websites. At the end of research projects, this code is often collecting digital dust on researchers hard drives
instead of being made public for others to employ. paperboy offers writers of webscraping scripts a clear path to
publish their code and earn co-authorship on the package, while promising users to deliver news media data from
many websites in a consistent format. With 177 covered as of today and a default scraper that often works well
enough, paperboy can already facilitate a large range of research projects.
- Demo: demo_paperboy.qmd
- Package: https://jbgruber.github.io/paperboy/
- Paper: [paper_paperboy.pdf][paper_paperboy.pdf]
The social media platform TikTok has surged in societal and political significance, underscoring the need for
communication researchers to study its content and dynamics. traktok is an R package that combines an
implementation of the TikTok Research API with access to TikTok content through web-scraping and the 'hidden' API,
which was reverse engineered to grant users access to more content. While it is neither the first nor only tool to do
so, the combination both ways to retrieve data from the platform with an easy-to-understand consistent syntax is built
to encourage TikTok research.
- Demo: demo_traktok.qmd
- Package: https://jbgruber.github.io/traktok/
- Paper: [paper_traktok.pdf][paper_traktok.pdf]