Replication package for the Mastodon instance rules paper

Data & code for the paper: Wähner, M., Deubel, A., Breuer, J., & Weller, K. (2024). “Don’t Research Us” – How Mastodon Instance Rules Connect to Research Ethics. Publizistik. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11616-024-00855-6

Data & setup

• The full data set can be found in the on data folder.
• You can run/source the (code in) the file setup.R contained in the analysis folder to install all required packages.

Get instances and rules

You can run the following scripts to call the Mastodon API, get instances and rules, and save them as .csv files.

Note: Collecting these data requires access tokens for the Mastodon API. You can check the documentation of the rtoot package for further information on this.

• get_instances.R
• get_rules.R
• instance_preprocess.R

Preprocessing

• pipeline_preprocess.R (see language_detection.R for more details)
• analysis_preprocess.R
• language_detection.R for language detection

Analysis

• meta_information.R for instance information
• keyword_detection.R and keyword_in_context.R for string detection
• topicmodeling.R and topic_model_finalR for LDA topic modeling
• plot_terms.R for visualization
• bi_trigram.R for bi- and trigrams