Limited but reliable and legal academic access to X data from the previous 30 days is available via XSifter. For now, the USD pricing model is:
- $100 to license the first 5,000 posts and take a free training session.
- $15/1,000 to license additional posts for academics or non-profits.
- $25/1,000 to license additional posts for commercial users.
- 5% discount if you license 100,000 posts or 10% if you license 500,000.
- For now, there is a relatively low monthly quota for the XSifter application as a whole.
- Query testing and refinement currently requires a free full serve meeting.
- The X data is stored and analyzed in DiscoverText, where you can collaborate with unlimited peers for free.
- The phrase "replicate, replicate, replicate" was popularized by political scientists Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba (often abbreviated as KKV). It emphasizes that scientific transparency, open data, and the ability to reproduce research findings are the ultimate safeguards of scientific validity in social science.
Per the KKV maxim "replicate, replicate, replicate," this is an X-compliant replication platform. Other academics can replicate your study without need to "rehydrate" and datasets can be used in the classroom for teaching a variety of methods. Deleted, suspended, and protected posts are not displayed.
- While data downloads are not permitted, graphml files for network visualization can be generated.
- There are some interesting new metadata fields supplied by X, such as public metrics bookmark count and public metrics impression count.
- We append certain hybrid metadata fields for filtering. One is the number of followers per day a user has acquired over the life of the account. Filtering for accounts that acquire 100+ followers a day always unearths something interesting about X affordances.
- Self-serve access with free microsampling and AI-assisted query refinement is 2-3 weeks away.
- The most recent experiment (keyword: data centers) yielded just under 17,000 posts (excluding retweets) from the last 14 days. This dataset and others from the beta testing are available to anyone who books a meeting to learn about the tools.
Book a full serve query testing meeting here:
https://calendly.com/discovertext