Using Actor Sets

Monitor across platforms for all the channels of the actors you care about.

We often face the research challenge of wanting to monitor a specific group of people or institutions—we call them actors—across all their online activity: many channels across multiple online platforms. For example, all the online channels, across platforms, for all elected politicians in a country. Which posts and narratives are getting the most engagement?

In Junkipedia, you can achieve this using actor sets.

Actor sets are collections of common actors (like people and organizations) that you can use as free starting points for your research, provided by Junkipedia. Learn more about actors and actor sets in the Glossary.

You can view a list of all the actor sets you have enabled on the Actor Sets page.

Enabling Actor Sets

Researchers in different contexts are interested in different actor sets—for example, most often its US-based researchers who are interested in monitoring a US politicians actor set, but others not so much.

To keep things clear, you can enable the actor sets that are relevant for your work and not see the ones that aren't.

1. On the Manage Your Account page, scroll down to Actor Sets. Here you will see the currently available actor sets.

2. Click on the check-boxes for the actor sets you want to use, and click ‘Update’ to save these settings.

Only the actor sets you enable will show up for you as filter options on the Monitoring and Channels pages.

Monitoring with actor sets

Once you have enabled an actor set, you will see it listed under the Actor Sets filter on the Monitoring and Channels pages.

Click on the Actor Sets filter to apply the actor sets you have enabled.

Filtering with special actor set attributes

If you are monitoring an actor set, you can apply special filters for any actor set specific attributes (learn more about actor set attributes in the glossary).

1. Click on the arrow button to show the extended filters.

2. Open the 'Actor Set Attributes' filter to see all the available filters for each actor set.

3. When you select an attribute to filter by, a new filter option will appear, allowing you to apply filters for the values for that attribute.

You can filter using attributes that are particular to your actor set. In this example, filter by state to see just the posts from politicians in Alaska.

Creating charts with actor set attributes

You can also view your monitoring results as charts, and break the data down using these attributes.

1. Click the chart icon to view your monitoring results as a chart.

The 'View as' settings are on the right hand side of the monitoring results.

2. Update the 'Breakdown by' configuration to use on of the actor set attributes, to show a comparison of the posts by different kinds of actors in your set.

This chart shows posts for the last 7 days, broken down by the actor set attribute 'Registered Political Party' allowing you to compare the frequency of posts by politicians in the different parties listed.