Exploring usability of Reddit in data science and knowledge processing
This work provides a practical resource for researchers and practitioners in data science by facilitating easier access to Reddit data, though it is incremental in nature.
The paper argues that Reddit is a useful data source for data science and knowledge processing across almost any topic, backed by analysis of 180 manually annotated papers and data from scientific databases, and introduces an open source tool for accessing Reddit resources and performing exploratory data analysis.
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.