About ECHO

ECHO — Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online — is a searchable repository of datasets about human behaviour on online platforms: social networks, discussion forums, messaging services, review sites and news.

It is maintained by Braden Switzer and Reza Zafarani at Syracuse University.

What ECHO is

ECHO brings together datasets from many sources under one index. Every dataset has a record describing where it came from, who produced it, what it contains and how to cite it, and each one keeps its original authors and licence.

Where the data can be redistributed, a copy is hosted here with checksums and a provenance file, so retrieving it does not depend on the original host staying online.

Each dataset also carries computed analytics — network structure and an interactive network view, text characteristics, topic clusters, frequent terms — produced by ECHO's processing pipeline. For very large corpora the analytics are computed on a sample, and the dataset page gives the sample size.

Coverage

Some sources distribute only identifiers — tweet IDs, for example — because the platform's terms restrict redistributing content. Those datasets are indexed with their full record, and their page marks them as identifiers only.

Contact

Corrections, additions and questions: echo@data.syr.edu

Citation

@misc{echo2026,
  title  = {ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online},
  author = {Switzer, Braden and Zafarani, Reza},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://echo.directory},
  note   = {Syracuse University}
}