Welcome to TikTok Re:Search, a blog series dedicated to sharing knowledge, techniques and technology for performing academic research using TikTok data.
The blog was started primarily as an outlet for the Influencer Stories of Mental Health and Young People project, an ESRC-funded project seeking to understand the impact of the way influencers on sites like TikTok discuss mental health and the impact it has, particularly on young people. If you are interested in the particulars of that project or the team leading it, you can find much more about it here. Moreso than sharing our own TikTok findings, however, the aim of this space is to position you, the reader and likely colleague of ours, to do your own large-scale TikTok-based research.
TikTok presents perhaps the greatest level of granularity to social media researchers currently, but little has been written about how TikTok can be used, and accessing TikTok data requires some familiarity with writing and executing code, as well as knowledge of data handling and manipulation, and that is a barrier to entry for many.
On this blog, we will take you through each individual step in that process in a manner that requires little to no prior knowledge of coding and provide you with custom, easily-understood python scripts and ready-made software for collecting, building and analysing your own corpus of TikTok data.
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- Getting Access to TikTok Data as a Researcher
- Collecting Data – Videos