Our data collection begins with the seedlist. A seed (or entity) is a person, group, organization, or media product that is of substantive interest to Canada’s media ecosystem. A seedlist is a data table in which each row represents a unique seed and the columns contain a unique seed ID, the seed’s social media handles,…

Topic modeling plays an essential role in helping us make sense of the large volumes of unstructured text inherent in digital trace data. It is fully embedded in our data pipeline: we gather data, process it through topic models, index the outputs, and explore the results using visualization tools. Our open-source implementation of this pipeline…

We are the Digital Trace team at the Media Technology and Democracy (McGill University). Our mission is simple but ambitious: to bridge Applied AI and Computational Social Science by building scalable infrastructure to collect, process, and analyze cross-platform social media data. Our insights empower researchers, policymakers, and journalists to better understand how digital information shapes society. Technical Power: Infrastructure &…