4chan archives?

[CheeseburgerToss]

I'm very uncertain how common these are, but does anybody have full-text (seriously, only text, no images - too heavy) archives of 4chan's /pol/ and maybe /b/? Lots of boards have dedicated archival websites, but they typically provide a web interface to their data rather than just giving you thread dumps, which is fine if I was looking for something in particular - but I am more interested in analysis of themes.

I remember seeing a /pol/ archive that somebody did academically, but it was as I recall 2016-2017 and stopped thereafter.

I absolutely could (read: should) start archiving myself, however that would not get me back to the mid-2000's.

Both /pol/ and /b/ should provide some insight into early internet politics, which has been a hobby research project of mine.

I'm absolutely willing to seed anything remotely relevant to this via dedicated seedbox for torrents and/or can mirror it if anyone would like. I would also be happy to share my work as I dig through it!

 

[ninturez0]

Older 4chan threads (<2012-ish) have been poorly, or not at all archived.

https://old.sage.moe/ is a Foolfuuka instance that has repaired and imported Jason Scott's text-only dump of 4chan threads for easy browsing and reading. /pol/ is not present in this archive because it didn't exist yet.

The Yotsuba Society archives contain a small amount of early /pol/ and /b/ threads.

 

[CheeseburgerToss]

Thanks! I'm downloading this now.

https://zenodo.org/record/3606810 is the academic dataset I mentioned, turns out it's a 3 year span, which is pretty exciting as well!

 

[ninturez0]

Thanks! I'm downloading this now.

Click to shrink...

You should know that the archive is corrupted and the owner of old.sage.moe had to manually repair it in order to extract the data.

 

[Deleted member 334]

few problems with this:
1. i don't understand the point of looking for an archive of an imageboard that doesn't contain images (i'm opposed to the idea of archiving boards at all as it erodes the anonymity and impermanent nature of it which is the whole point, but that's a different subject). you'd be doing yourself a disservice from a research perspective. it's like listening to the audio of a movie and reading subtitles and pretending that you got the full picture. If it's "too heavy" for you, maybe you should either harden yourself to these kinds of things before you look into them, or not look altogether.
2. /pol/ is contemporary and not "early internet politics" by any means. if you want that, you're better off digging through BBS archives.

T E X T F I L E S

 

[arena]

I TH

few problems with this:
1. i don't understand the point of looking for an archive of an imageboard that doesn't contain images (i'm opposed to the idea of archiving boards at all as it erodes the anonymity and impermanent nature of it which is the whole point, but that's a different subject). you'd be doing yourself a disservice from a research perspective. it's like listening to the audio of a movie and reading subtitles and pretending that you got the full picture. If it's "too heavy" for you, maybe you should either harden yourself to these kinds of things before you look into them, or not look altogether.
2. /pol/ is contemporary and not "early internet politics" by any means. if you want that, you're better off digging through BBS archives.

T E X T F I L E S

Click to shrink...

I think he meant that images are too heavy filesize wise

also nice pfp :)

 

[Deleted member 334]

I TH

I think he meant that images are too heavy filesize wise

also nice pfp :)

Click to shrink...

doubt
check his other posts and you'll see he has too much free space on his seedbox :D
if you can't hang, you can't hang.
also idk what he means when he says he'll "share his work" like he's reporting from the other side of the Great Firewall kek
i feel like if you're here already that shit should be no mystery to you but maybe i'm just showing my age