[liberationtech] The Survey Bay, searchable database of TPB data

[Marcin de Kaminski]

Dear all! 

I'm a part of the Cybernorms Research Group at the Lund University Internet Institute, Sweden. For the third year
in a row we are preparing to do a large survey study, using The Pirate Bay for data collection about the demographics of the file sharing community. The series of studies is called "The Research Bay". You can
read about them here:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/pirate-bay-becomes-research-bay-to-aid-p2p-researchers/
(2011) and
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-partners-with-academic-researchers-to-counter-propaganda-120509/
(2012).

This year we are adding some extra bonus, which I think makes it even more interesting - we have released an online database with the data from previous surveys (currently the 2011 is up, we are planning on releasing the 2012 data as well), free for all to search, browse, read and use. Since we have around 75000 answers, and 25000 open answers with the respondents own comments, we like to think this is the largest database regarding file sharing community demographics out there, offering an unique insight in things like file sharing habits/anonymity/politics and other.

A couple of articles have already been written on parts of the content of the data:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/pirate-bay-becomes-research-bay-to-aid-p2p-researchers/
http://torrentfreak.com/girls-are-not-into-the-pirate-bay-or-bittorrent-110919/
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-users-long-for-anonymity-111021/

A couple academic articles have already been written on the data, some can be found here: http://cybernormer.se/publikationer/

What is released now is the complete dataset, searchable with possibility for anyone to do comparisons, dig into the data and do some nice graphs. It's all up on http://www.thesurveybay.com

Hope you find this interesting!

Best,
Marcin

-- 
Marcin de Kaminski
PhDc Sociology of Law, University of Lund
Lund University Internet Institute, Cybernorms Research Group
Personal homepage - www.dekaminski.se

Phone#: +46-(0)768-045151