SocialPulse: An Open-Source Subreddit Sensemaking Toolkit
Stephanie Birkelbach, Maria Teleki, Peter Carragher, Xiangjue Dong, Nehul Bhatnagar, James Caverlee

TL;DR
SocialPulse is an open-source toolkit that integrates multiple analysis methods to facilitate comprehensive, transparent, and reproducible sensemaking of Reddit communities and discourse dynamics.
Contribution
It introduces a unified, extensible platform combining topic modeling, sentiment analysis, user characterization, and bot detection for subreddit analysis.
Findings
Enables fluid exploration of trends and content at multiple granularities
Allows comparison of active and long-tail contributors
Facilitates examination of temporal discourse shifts
Abstract
Understanding how online communities discuss and make sense of complex social issues is a central challenge in social media research, yet existing tools for large-scale discourse analysis are often closed-source, difficult to adapt, or limited to single analytical views. We present SocialPulse, an open-source subreddit sensemaking toolkit that unifies multiple complementary analyses -- topic modeling, sentiment analysis, user activity characterization, and bot detection -- within a single interactive system. SocialPulse enables users to fluidly move between aggregate trends and fine-grained content, compare highly active and long-tail contributors, and examine temporal shifts in discourse across subreddits. The demo showcases end-to-end exploratory workflows that allow researchers and practitioners to rapidly surface themes, participation patterns, and emerging dynamics in large Reddit…
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Taxonomy
TopicsMisinformation and Its Impacts · Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining · Computational and Text Analysis Methods
