Social scientists have long been interested in studying cultural production—the introduction and dissemination of information and material that seeks to uphold or challenge existing assumptions that permeate our various cultures. The problem was how to study this effectively. The Internet solved the problem of finding new and interesting cultural data. But given the huge volume of new and constantly updating information available on the Web, it created a new problem – accessing and making use of all of this amazing data.
Cultr offers a solution to this problem. Cultr is a developing suite of web-based tools designed to provide researchers with a convenient and highly accessible means of studying cultural production via digital media. With our suite of text, image and Twitter meta-data engines, researchers can discover new insight about the use of various cultural artifacts across a range of web sites including company websites, blogs, and social media. As opposed to traditional “web scrapers / crawlers” which merely look to copy and store information from the Internet, our meta-data engines analyze the Web based on user-defined inputs, producing new and useful information for research purposes.
These tools are provided free of charge to the public. All we ask is that you cite our work as you produce and publish your own: Gehman & Grimes, 2015-2020. http://cultrtoolkit.com
Collect data on the use of particular words across any set of web sites.
Collect data on the use of particular images(e.g.,frequency, area, placement) across any set of web sites.
Collect data on the use of particular words, hash tags, and mentions across any set of Twitter handles.
Explore the twitter network of friends and followers of any number of twitter handles.
Cultr is the brainchild of Joel Gehman and Matthew Grimes, professors at the University of Alberta School of Business and the Cambridge Judge Business School. Funding for the beta development of Cultr was provided in part by grants from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Killam Research Fund, the Alberta School of Business, and the Canadian Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility. For their help with software development, we thank Alexander Cheung, Shakeeb Ahmed, Tyler Lazar, Kimberly Wu, and Eddie Santos. We thank Devon Mielke for helping with the website infrastructure.
The Cultr team uses Asana to coordinate. We use Git with Bitbucket to collaborate on code. The web crawlers use the Scrapy Python library as a base, and heavily extend upon it. This website is powered by the Django Web Framework.
