Collection 38: Reddit on the Humanities

A collection of 124,340 Reddit comments longer than 225 words from 2006 to 2018 containing the terms "humanities," "liberal arts," or "the arts."

Explanation

WE1S's rationale and methodology for collecting Reddit posts to study public discourse about the humanities (especially by students) is explained in the blog post by WE1S's lead Reddit researcher Raymond Steding: "A Digital Humanities Study of Reddit Student Discourse about the Humanities" (2019).

As Steding notes, he initially collected 3.3 terabytes of Reddit data from 2006 to 2018 (approximately five billion comments) by downloading it from pushshift.io in JSON format. Data for 2019 was later added.

This data was filtered to retain only comments containing at least one of the terms humanities, liberal arts, or the arts. Then to improve the coherence of topic models of the collection and to make the number of documents more tractable, WE1S subtracted comments under 225 words. WE1S did not weed out duplicates in this collection; nor filter posts and comments based on Reddit user “karma” scores.