SocSciBot

SocSciBot and associated software: Conditions of use

• SocSciBot is licenced for non-commercial purposes only. We also do not accept liability for any damage resulting from its use, or for loss of data or other problems caused by the operations of the programs downloaded.
• You must enter your correct email address into the program, when requested, and check your email during periods of crawling (in case web masters complain about your web crawling). SocSciBot will automatically email the webmasters of sites that you crawl so that they know you are crawling and have the option to email you to tell you to stop crawling.
• You must not use SocSciBot to crawl web sites of organisations that may not be able to afford the bandwidth that you are using (e.g., in poorer countries).
• You must not overload the web servers that you are crawling by repeatedly crawling them, e.g. every day, and it is your responsibility to ensure that you use the software carefully. It is a condition of using SocSciBot on web servers other than your own that you first read the following paper for a discussion of ethical issues for crawling. [Thelwall, M. & Stuart, D . (2006). Web crawling ethics revisited: Cost, privacy and denial of service. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.]
• You must accept that your copy of SocSciBot may be remotely disabled without warning, for example if there are any complaints about its use.
• You must accept that your use of SocSciBot will be remotely logged. This is to ensure that it is not being used in an unethical way, or to identify the cause of complaints. Except in the case of apparent unethical use, this information will not be revealed to a third party or used for any other purpose. (this has not happened yet)

SocSciBot and associated software: Downloads and instructions

Download the programs only if you accept the conditions of use.

• I have read the conditions of use (above) and accept them and now wish to download SocSciBot, SocSciBot Tools and Cyclist. Unzip the file into a new folder in order to use the programs. PLEASE READ TUTORIAL 1 BEFORE FIRST USE as the the first use initialises some important parts of the software. If this overwrites a previous version of SocSciBot, please delete the SocSciBot.ini file before running the new version of SocSciBot.

Tutorials and extra information for SocSciBot 4. (If using SocSciBot 3 then follow the link to the SocSciBot 3 FAQ and Tutorials).

• To convert large link structure files to Pajek, Tobias Escher of University College London has supplied a special Perl program, available here.
• Tutorial 1: Introduction to SocSciBot, SocSciBot Tools and Cyclist Please go through this immediately upon downloading SocSciBot. It will make you familiar with the core features of the software and give a brief demonstration of its capabilities.
• Tutorial 2: Mini link analysis research project case study Using SocSciBot and SocSciBot Tools for a small scale link analysis research project, to introduce the key features available for link analysis research.
• Tutorial 3: Summary of how to use SocSciBot for a link analysis research project.
• Corpus Linguistics Tutorial: Using SocSciBot and Cyclist for text analysis/basic corpus linguistics. Cyclist is a concordancer/search engine interface to the text of your downloaded sites. It is compatible only with SocSciBot files.
• Frequently Asked Questions.