LibGuides: Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA): Find Existing Data Sets

Existing Data Sets

You may wish to check if a dataset or corpora is already available before creating your own. This can be useful if you don't have time to extract your own data, or you'd like to practice with a real dataset. What follows is a list of free and open datasets.

If you are interested in licensed content, please check UT's Linguistics Research Guide. If you want to use library databases for text mining, please go to this page. You will have to apply and possibly pay fees to a publisher to access published content.

Social Media Data

Apply for Access to CrowdTangle
CrowdTangle started a pilot program in 2019 to partner with researchers and academics to help them study the spread of public content on Facebook and Instagram. In that time, researchers have used CrowdTangle to report on and analyze critical topics such as racial justice, misinformation and abuse of social platforms. Now, CrowdTangle is opening up applications further to university researchers.
DocNow Tweet Catalog
The DocNow Catalog is a collectively curated listing of Twitter datasets. Public datasets are shared as Tweet IDs, which can be hydrated back into full datasets using a Hydrator desktop application.
SOMAR - Social Media Archive at ICPSR
SOMAR's mission is to provide a centralized and reliable repository for social media research data. The archive contains a range of data collected from large-scale social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. The data in the archive takes two forms. They can be public, i.e., available for immediate download, and/or restricted, i.e., available within our secure data enclave after receiving approval following a submitted restricted data application.
Tweet Sets
Collection of large Twitter datasets (tweet IDs) on a variety of newsworthy topics, including a number of political and election-related topics (primarily US) back to 2016. To use them, you have to rehydrate the tweets using a tool like DocNow’s Hydrator: https://github.com/DocNow/hydrator.
X (formerly Twitter)
In order to view or search posts, you must have an individual account. As of 2023, the Twitter API is no longer freely available to academic researchers. For information on the cost for access see Twitter Data for Academic Research.
Twitter Scraping Research Guide
Twitter scraping can be done with or without API keys. This guide aims to make Twitter scraping widely accessible by providing sample scripts, a list of important scraping tools, additional resources to help manage your scraped data, and sample peer-reviewed studies using data harvested from Twitter.