Building a Media Ecosystem Observatory from Scratch: Infrastructure, Methodology, and Insights
Zeynep Pehlivan, Saewon Park, Alexei Sisulu Abrahams, Mika Desblancs-Patel, Benjamin David Steel, Aengus Bridgman

TL;DR
This paper introduces the Canadian Media Ecosystem Observatory, a scalable infrastructure for monitoring and analyzing political and media discourse across multiple digital platforms in near real time.
Contribution
It presents a comprehensive infrastructure with custom crawlers, data normalization, and semantic analysis tools, providing a new model for digital trace research in media ecosystems.
Findings
Demonstrated utility through analysis of Canadian political events
Provided real-time insights into media discourse dynamics
Enabled advanced similarity search and topic modeling
Abstract
Understanding the flow of information across today's fragmented digital media landscape requires scalable, cross-platform infrastructure. In this paper, we present the Canadian Media Ecosystem Observatory, a national-scale infrastructure designed to monitor political and media discourse across platforms in near real time. Media Ecosystem Observatory (MEO) data infrastructure features custom crawlers for major platforms, a unified indexing pipeline, and a normalization layer that harmonizes heterogeneous schemas into a common data model. Semantic embeddings are computed for each post to enable similarity search and vector-based analyses such as topic modeling and clustering. Processed and raw data are made accessible through API, dashboards and website, supporting both automated and ad hoc research workflows. We illustrate the utility of the observatory through example analyses of…
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Taxonomy
TopicsComputational and Text Analysis Methods · Social Media and Politics · Media Studies and Communication
