The first step in conducting research involves acquiring an appropriate dataset. .. Apps Script is a scripting platform developed by Google, that provides a user-friendly interface that enables easy automation and interaction with various Google services, including YouTube’s API.
For many years I was custodian of TAGS, a Google Sheets solution to archive Twitter searches. This came to an abrupt end when Twitter put a hefty paywall on API access. I’m sure there were ‘bad actors’ using TAGS, but I was also aware there were a number of academics and students using this solution to help make the world a little better. As noted in this source post “Dataset plays a crucial role in ensuring the accuracy and dependability of the results we obtain”.
For social scientists looking for new datasets this post from Randie Pathirage highlights how you can use Google Apps Script to get comments on YouTube videos using the YouTube Data API.
Learn how to setup email alerts for YouTube videos and get daily automatically notification when new videos are uploaded that match your search topics.
Very slick example from Amit Agarwal and for the more advanced Google Apps Script developer well worth checking out the source code to see how Amit handles setting up and managing script triggers.
How to automatically update the title of your YouTube video to accurately reflect the views and comment count in the title.
Amit Agarwal has a great eye for these little tweaks. The source post has all the code you need (one note to keep in mind is you might get into authentication loops if using other Google Apps Script services with this script solution)
Clever little script that extracts comments from YouTube videos and posts notifications to Gmail … this solution is useful if you want to track comments on other peoples YouTube videos
