Exploring usability of Reddit in data science and knowledge processing

TL;DR

This contribution argues that Reddit, as a massive, categorized, open-access dataset, is a useful data source, on "almost any topic", which can be used for data science and knowledge exploration.

Abstract

This contribution argues that Reddit, as a massive, categorized, open-access dataset, is a useful data source, for "almost any topic". Hence, it can be used in data science, e.g. for knowledge exploration. This statement is backed-up with presented analysis, based on 180 manually annotated papers, related to Reddit itself, and data acquired from popular databases of scientific papers. Finally, an open source tool is introduced, which provides an easy access to Reddit resources, and an exploratory data analysis of how Reddit covers selected topics. These functions can be used as a prelude analysis to a broader exploration of Reddit's applicability.

Figures (14)

• Figure 1: Reddit structure
• Figure 1: Article count by the month of the submission date
• Figure 1: Exemplary wordclouds of 200 posts (before 01-09-2021) concerning (top to bottom): "music", "rock" and "The Beatles".
• Figure 2: Number of authors for the selected papers
• Figure 2: Word clouds of 100 posts title from subreddit r/Coronavirusat different times during COVID-19 pandemic (left to right: 01-02-2020, 01-05-2020 and 08-12-2020)