After years of working on research software development mostly in our spare time, we are very happy that CAT4SMR (Capture and Anaysis Tools for Social Media Research) was funded in May 2020 by the Dutch PDI- SSH (Platform Digital Infrastructure Social Science and Humanities).

We (Erik Borra, Stijn Peeters, and Bernhard Rieder) will be able to use this opportunity to improve and stabilize the social media analysis tools we have been working on over the years: DMI-TCAT, 4CAT, YouTube Data Tools, and others. Who knows, we may even be able to revive Netvizz, which had do close down after changes in Facebook’s API governance.

The project started work in September 2020, beginning with the usual practicalities and some initial improvements to code quality and documentation. 2021 will see much more activity on all fronts. Stay tuned.