Building a Media Ecosystem Observatory from Scratch: Infrastructure, Methodology, and Insights
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understanding the flow of information across today's fragmented digital media landscape requires scalable, cross-platform infrastructure. In this paper, we present the Canadian Media Ecosystem Observatory, a national-scale infrastructure designed to monitor political and media discourse across platforms in near real time. Media Ecosystem Observatory (MEO) data infrastructure features custom crawlers for major platforms, a unified indexing pipeline, and a normalization layer that harmonizes heterogeneous schemas into a common data model. Semantic embeddings are computed for each post to enable similarity search and vector-based analyses such as topic modeling and clustering. Processed and raw data are made accessible through API, dashboards and website, supporting both automated and ad hoc research workflows. We illustrate the utility of the observatory through example analyses of major Canadian political events, including Meta's 2023 news ban and the recent federal elections. As a whole, the system offers a model for digital trace infrastructure and an evolving research platform for studying the dynamics of modern media ecosystems.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it