Exploring usability of Reddit in data science and knowledge processing

TL;DR

This paper explores Reddit's potential as a rich, open-access data source for data science and knowledge processing, supported by analysis of related literature and an open source tool for data access.

Contribution

It introduces an open source tool for accessing Reddit data and demonstrates Reddit's applicability for knowledge exploration through analysis of scientific papers.

Findings

Reddit covers a wide range of topics relevant to data science.

An open source tool facilitates easy access to Reddit data.

Reddit can be effectively used for exploratory data analysis.

Abstract

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.