Twi-XL: An Infrastructure for Cross-Media Research in the Netherlands

In the domain of media and communication research, copyright and privacy issues provide significant obstacles to achieving the strategic goals of open science. Investigating the role of different media in shaping public debates is especially difficult, as research across different media collections and platforms is not yet systematically supported by open research infrastructures on a global scale. Moreover, the private ownership of crucial communication spaces such as social media results in unreliable access opportunities for researchers and unclear conditions regarding the completeness and integrity of data where platform owners provide their own archives. This also creates obstacles for users without a technical background who are interested in gathering information, exploring, or making sense of big data. In response to these challenges, a consortium of two universities (the University of Amsterdam and the University of Groningen), two national archives (the National Library of the Netherlands and the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision), and SURF as a national research IT supporter created Twi-XL: Designed to facilitate cross-media research, it provides a research environment in which users of varying computational skill levels can apply automated methods to a range of archival collections, including websites, public broadcasts, radio and podcast transcripts, and over 10 years of Dutch tweets. The societal relevance of Twi-XL lies in creating a user-friendly tool that can be used by researchers to analyze societal phenomena across social media and traditional media, capturing how public debate unfolds across interconnected media environments. We describe and demonstrate the functional logic of Twi-XL with two use cases focused on: (a) social media affordances and users’ practices of news sharing, and (b) the broader public debate on sexual misconduct. Going beyond the dominance of the English language in cross-media research, our results not only showcase the advantages of developing cross-media infrastructures specific to the Dutch language, but also how Twi-XL can be utilized in qualitative and quantitative research. Embedding Twi-XL in the broader discussion on transparency, reproducibility, and accessibility, we discuss the implications and feasibility of such infrastructures, particularly for analyzing social media content.