SocialPulse: An Open-Source Subreddit Sensemaking Toolkit

Stephanie Birkelbach, Maria Teleki, Peter Carragher, Xiangjue Dong, Nehul Bhatnagar, James Caverlee

Keywords: Reddit, sensemaking, social media, exploratory data analysis

Abstract: Understanding how online communities discuss and make sense of complex social issues is a central challenge in social media research, yet existing tools for large-scale discourse analysis are often closed-source, difficult to adapt, or limited to single analytical views. We present SocialPulse, an open-source subreddit sensemaking toolkit that unifies multiple complementary analyses -- topic modeling, sentiment analysis, user activity characterization, and bot detection -- within a single interactive system. SocialPulse enables users to fluidly move between aggregate trends and fine-grained content, compare highly active and long-tail contributors, and examine temporal shifts in discourse across subreddits. This work presents end-to-end exploratory workflows that allow researchers and practitioners to rapidly surface themes, participation patterns, and emerging dynamics in large Reddit datasets. A case study using SocialPulse highlights how exploratory analysis of the r/conspiracy subreddit can reveal findings on topic-dependent sentiment patterns, temporal variation in community engagement, and cross-community content duplication with other subreddits such as r/politics. By offering an extensible and openly available platform, SocialPulse provides a practical and reusable foundation for transparent, reproducible sensemaking of online community discourse.

Submission Type: Short Paper (archival)

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Submission Number: 3