AppsScriptPulse

Building a YouTube comments dataset with Google Apps Script

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.

Source: YouTube Comment Scraping Made Easy with Apps Script