Analysis of Web Browsing Data: A Guide

Abstract

The use of individual-level browsing data, i.e., the records of a person’s visits to online content through a desktop or mobile browsers and apps, is an increasingly important re- source for social scientists. Browsing data have characteristics that raise many questions for statistical analysis, yet to date, little hands-on guidance on how to handle them exists. Reviewing extant research, and exploring data sets collected through our four research teams spanning seven countries and several years, with over 14,000 participants and 360 million web visits, we derive recommendations along four steps typical for studies using browsing data: preprocessing the raw data; filtering out observations; classifying web vis- its; and modeling browsing behavior. We hope that the recommendations we formulate provides a foundation for discussions about best practices in the field, which so far has paid little attention to justifying the many analytical decisions typical for studies using browsing data.

What News Is Shared Where and How: A Multi-Platform Analysis of News Shared During the 2022 U.S. Midterm Elections

“…The Media Thesaurus is a news media list that contains the news domain and its news type classification. It is compiled from multiple publicly available lists: (1) from Media Bias/Fact Check 4 which lists many news sites and rates the factuality and credibility of the reporting; (2) the George Washington University Dataverse (Littman et al, 2020) which categorizes a list of over 9,600 Twitter accounts for media organizations that are derived from over 160 million Tweets between 2016 and 2020; (3) the Columbia Journalism Review as a source for hundreds of Pink Slime News outlet domains (Tow, 2020); (4) a Github Repository 5 that collages unreliable and misleading news sources from Snopes Field Guide, Wikipedia, and other domains; (5) a Github Repository 6 that consolidates a list of most frequented web domains and most frequently tweeted domains by U.S. politicians and the corresponding news type labels; and (6) a consolidation of Local News through a list of authentic local news sites owned by companies (Clemm von Hohenberg et al, 2021;Free Press, 2022). After consolidation, this Media Thesaurus is harmonized among the sources.…”