[Air-L] Tools for archiving and analysing Reddit posts

[Tim Squirrell]

Hi all,

I'm currently about to embark on an ethnography of a Reddit community as
part of my doctoral research into the construction and negotiation of
authority and expertise in online fitness and nutrition communities.

I was wondering whether anyone might have any experience of documenting and
analysing Reddit threads and subreddits. I've tried using Zotero, but it
makes analysis quite slow and clunky; with NVivo I've had limited success
using nodes and trying to capture both posts and comment sections with the
NCapture tool. One of the problems I'm encountering is that content is
often linked and spread across multiple different sites of different kinds,
and documentation methods that work in one place are less useful in
another. I essentially want to be able to take a snapshot such that I can
preserve the data as it was when I encountered it, as well as being able to
perform a discourse analysis on the contents of a given thread.

It might just be that I'm inexperienced in using NVivo and that there are
ways of dealing with the issues I'm having, in which case any tips or
advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Tim Squirrell
PhD Candidate & Postgraduate Tutor
Department of Science, Technology and Innovation Studies
University of Edinburgh