Developed by the Social Media Lab (socialmedialab.ca) at Ryerson University, Netlytic (netlytic.org) is a cloud-based text and social network analyzer that aims to help uncover social networks from online conversations. Netlytic has the ability to import data from a number of sources—including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, text files, RSS feeds, and cloud storage—and advocates for ease of use as it requires no programming skills. However, Netlytic does require some underlying knowledge about the structure of the data you are working with. All in all, I found Netlytic to excel at carrying out exploratory analysis. In my opinion, more focused and descriptive analysis would require a different set of more specialized tools. Netlytic integrates a data harvester with a streamlined user interface. The result: ease of use and convenience.

1. community engagement
2. digital scholarship
3. open access
4. open scholarship
5. public humanities

Original publication: Meneses, Luis. Review of Netlytic by Anatoliy Gruzd (project lead). Early Modern Digital Review, vol. 2, no. 1, 2019, pp. 352–357, https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/renref/article/view/32866/25207. 5pp.