Datasets and Tools

DMPonline is a web-based tool provided by the UK’s Digital Curation Centre (DCC) that supports researchers to develop good quality data management and sharing plans.

The University of Newcastle’s Wasim Ahmed provides a semi-annual accounting of available Twitter research tools in the form of a Blog post. This 2021 post is his most recent.

SUNY Albany’s Sam Jackson developed the opensource tool described in and linked-to from this Blog post for VOX-Pol. Flockwatch monitors textual data collections for shifting language and automatically suggests new terms that researchers might want to use to collect data.

This University of Arizona AI Lab archive hosts data collected from jihadi online forums and other jihadi online spaces between c.2009 and 2012, also the full content of a selection of ‘Patriot, Militia, Hate and Linked Websites’ collected in the same timeframe.

TCAP is built by UNCTED-supported Tech Against Terrorism, with funding from the Canadian government. The TCAP tracks, verifies and analyses terrorist content across the internet to support the tech sector, academia and algorithmic augmentation. On Twitter @TCAPAlerts.

FutureLearn is a digital education platform, partly owned by The Open University, that hosts both free and fee-based Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). In terms of data-heavy research on online extremism and terrorism, FutureLearn hosts multiple free courses on using Python and R.

This site, which is accessible via many university libraries, is designed to guide users to the content they need to learn a little or a lot about a particular research method, either qualitative or quantitative (e.g. online interviewing, Python for social scientists). It includes access to books, book chapters, articles, ‘how to’ videos, and online courses.

Access multiple reports on data-gathering for violent extremism and terrorism research, including on data challenges around lone actor terrorism research, conducting experiments, and building secondary source databases.

This paper details the authors’ experiences in using computation research methods to conduct international comparative research on very large data collections, including the main problems encountered and some short-term approaches to mitigating some of these.

ThIs free-to-access journal article "provides an overview on information retrieval techniques for locating high-quality literature on terrorism and counter-terrorism."