YOUPOL: A database for measuring and studying political ideas
Presented at CPSA (Ottawa, June 2-4, 2026), this presentation introduces YOUPOL: a continuously updated infrastructure designed to capture and analyze what political creators actually say on YouTube and TikTok. It presents the full pipeline, from distributed collection and transcription to LLM-in-the-loop annotation, preserved deletions, and open data access.
Current database scale and access
YOUPOL currently includes 30,062 videos across 69 channels, 9,319,375 archived comments, 4,798,114 annotated sentences, and 2,305 preserved deletions. Live exploration is available on data.you-pol.com.
Collaborative infrastructure and YCCN
The infrastructure is collaborative through the YouPol Collaborative Computing Network (YCCN): partner researchers connect local machines as workers to process queued videos, monitor jobs, and scale collection and annotation without centralizing all compute.
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