Collecting Online Activity Data Using the National Internet Observatory
Half Day Short Course | Register here
2026 APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition — Boston, MA
1:30 pm – 5:30 pm
The Internet serves as a vital platform for information access and global connectivity. Individuals are increasingly spending a significant portion of their lives online. From online deliberation to communication between elected representatives and constituents, the Internet has also had a significant relationship with democracy since its inception. The impact of the Internet has also been experienced in the context of threats to democracies such as online surveillance, Internet shutdowns, and online conspiracies about election processes. This widespread online engagement offers unprecedented opportunities to study human behavior at scale, yet researchers face significant ethical and technical barriers when attempting to collect data for academic studies. In particular, major social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have progressively restricted access to their official Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which previously served as primary tools for researchers to create customized datasets from specific platforms for studying online content production and engagement behavior. Content exposure and app usage behavior on mobile phones is an even rarer source of data despite a large chunk of online activity taking place on these devices. This workshop introduces the National Internet Observatory (NIO), an alternative data collection framework and infrastructure designed to help researchers study online behavior, with a particular focus on content viewing—the predominant form of online activity. The Observatory model offers an alternative, more democratic model to data access and use for academic research, including pathways to understand and analyze online traces of democratic crises. This course presents NIO’s informed data donation process, participant demographics and behavioral traces, secure computing infrastructure and pathways for data access, and examples of analyses and innovative research with this new source of data for the network science community. The course includes interactive activities and hands-on sessions with real datasets that demonstrate NIO’s capabilities for enabling novel cross-disciplinary and cross-platform research across web and social network environments to offer insights into the crises of democracy as experienced by Internet users in the US.
This short course is designed for academic researchers from all disciplines represented at APSA. There are no formal prerequisites for participation. Anyone interested in online activity data collection and research can participate and learn from this course. While a background in digital behavioral research helps participants better understand the challenges and opportunities that NIO presents, it is not required to learn about this new data collection infrastructure. By the end of this course, participants will:
- Learn about various methods of online activity data collection along with their pros and cons.
- Learn about a new infrastructure and framework for data collection in the post-API age.
- Learn about the research and analytical possibilities enabled by NIO and data donations, including the cross-platform potential of working with participants browsing activity, the kinds of research enabled by trace data being linked with survey data, research potential offered by trace data from mobile devices, and the interdisciplinary uses of these alternative data collection methods.
- Understand the data collected by NIO and how it could inform their own ongoing or future research.
- APSA Annual Meeting Pre-conference Short Courses are half- or full-day events that offer diverse professional development opportunities and allow attendees to connect with scholars from various backgrounds. This year’s pre-conference short courses will be held on Wednesday, September 2, 2026, in Boston, Massachusetts. Sponsored by APSA Organized Sections, Related Groups, and other affiliated organizations. All short courses require pre-registration to attend.
- Register here for the APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition »
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