DataParasite Enables Scalable and Repurposable Online Data Curation

TL;DR

DataParasite is an open-source, modular pipeline that enables scalable, accurate, and cost-effective online data collection for social science research, adaptable to various tasks with minimal manual effort.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, reusable data curation pipeline that decomposes tasks into entity-level searches, usable across multiple domains with natural-language instructions.

Findings

Achieves high accuracy across diverse social science datasets.

Reduces data collection costs by an order of magnitude.

Demonstrates versatility in multiple canonical tasks.

Abstract

Many questions in computational social science rely on datasets assembled from heterogeneous online sources, a process that is often labor-intensive, costly, and difficult to reproduce. Recent advances in large language models enable agentic search and structured extraction from the web, but existing systems are frequently opaque, inflexible, or poorly suited to scientific data curation. Here we introduce DataParasite, an open-source, modular pipeline for scalable online data collection. DataParasite decomposes tabular curation tasks into independent, entity-level searches defined through lightweight configuration files and executed through a shared, task-agnostic python script. Crucially, the same pipeline can be repurposed to new tasks, including those without predefined entity lists, using only natural-language instructions. We evaluate the pipeline on multiple canonical tasks in computational social science, including faculty hiring histories, elite death events, and political career trajectories. Across tasks, DataParasite achieves high accuracy while reducing data-collection costs by an order of magnitude relative to manual curation. By lowering the technical and labor barriers to online data assembly, DataParasite provides a practical foundation for scalable, transparent, and reusable data curation in computational social science and beyond.