KingsCAT: Capture and Analysis Tool for Social Media Research at King’s College London

A successful King's Research Infrastructure Fund (RIF) bid to support a new dedicated server to run KingsCAT, a customised instance of the open source 4CAT: Capture and Analysis Toolkit at King's College London to support interdisciplinary and collaborative social media research.

Deployed at dozens of universities around the world, 4CAT provides an accessible interface for gathering and analysing collections of data from platforms such as Douyin, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tiktok, Twitter/X, Tumblr, YouTube and Weibo.

KingsCAT is a cross-faculty initiative coordinated by the Digital Future Institute’s Centre for Digital Culture in collaboration with e-Research and colleagues from multiple institutes and centres (King’s Digital Lab, King’s Business School, King's Policy Institute, Centre for Data Futures, African Leadership Centre, The Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, and The Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication), as well as departments and schools (Population Health Sciences, War Studies, English, Inflammation Biology, Geography, Digital Humanities, Marketing, Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Immunology & Microbial Sciences and Culture, Media & Creative Industries). 

The aim of this initiative is to remove barriers, increase access and expand support for innovative, interdisciplinary research with digital media data and computational methods across departments and faculties at King’s regardless of level of programming skills, as well as to facilitate research development activities in this increasingly important research area.