Stack Exchange — retrocomputing.stackexchange.com
The content of retrocomputing.stackexchange.com (https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/), a Stack Exchange question-and-answer site, as published in the Stack Exchange Data Dump of April 2024 on the Internet Archive. The posts table holds 102,307 rows: 21,769 posts (5,958 questions, 14,873 answers, 469 tag wiki excerpts and 469 tag wikis) and 80,538 comments, written between 19 April 2016 and 31 March 2024. Beside it are 23,137 user accounts, 256,100 votes, 54,058 badges awarded, 597 tags, 70,022 post revisions and 1,698 links between posts. Every answer keeps the question it answers and every comment the post it was written on, so the threads can be rebuilt. The Internet Archive item describes the dump as anonymised; the votes table names the voter in only 38 rows.
Cite this dataset at
stackexchange-retrocomputing.echo.directory
Analytics
The full graph has 3,761 nodes; this view shows the 1,000-node sample the pipeline drew for display. Node size is centrality, colour is community.
Topic 0
Topic 1
Topic 2
Topic 3
Topic 4
Topic 5
Topic 6
Topic 7
Topic 8
Topic 9
Topic 10
Topic 11
Show all 17 topics
Topic 12
Topic 13
Topic 14
Topic 15
Topic 16
Computed over the full corpus.
Record
- Catalog key
stackexchange-retrocomputing-stackexchange-com- Authors
- Stack Exchange, Inc.
- Year
- 2024
- Source paper
- Stack Exchange Data Dump
- License
- CC BY-SA 3.0 / 4.0 (by contribution date) (CC-BY-SA-3.0 AND CC-BY-SA-4.0)
- Records
- 108,712
- Nodes
- 3,761
- Edges
- 10,521 (directed)
- Nodes are
- user (Stack Exchange account)
- Edges are
- answer collaboration (A answered B's question)
- Attributes
- nodes have attributes; edges have attributes
- Text corpus
- question titles, post bodies, comment text, tag names
- Languages
- en
- Collected
- 2016/2024 (2010s, 2020s)
- Tasks
- From the graph: link prediction, community detection
- Region
- Global (inferred: the platform is used worldwide)
Provenance
- Originally published at
- https://archive.org/details/stackexchange link checked
- Original files as received
- The source files, unconverted, kept for reference: mirrored on echo.directory on 2026-10-09, 39.5 MB across 1 files. Checksums in MANIFEST.json. For use, start with the data package below.
- Data package
- Version 1.0.0 of this dataset as an ECHO Data Package: posts (102,307 rows), users (23,137 rows), x_votes (256,100 rows), x_badges (54,058 rows), x_tags (597 rows), x_post_history (70,022 rows), x_post_links (1,698 rows).
- Structure
- Temporal (timestamped), Node attributes, Text, Threaded conversations
How to cite
BibTeX
@misc{echo2026,
title = {ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online},
author = {Switzer, Braden and Zafarani, Reza},
year = {2026},
url = {https://echo.directory},
note = {Syracuse University}
}
@misc{stackexchange_2024,
title = {Stack Exchange Data Dump},
author = {{Stack Exchange, Inc.}},
year = {2024},
month = {apr},
publisher = {Internet Archive},
url = {https://archive.org/details/stackexchange}
} APA
Switzer, B., & Zafarani, R. (2026). ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online [Data repository]. Syracuse University. https://echo.directory
Stack Exchange, Inc. (2024). Stack Exchange — retrocomputing.stackexchange.com [Data set]. https://stackexchange-retrocomputing.echo.directory/
MLA
Switzer, Braden, and Reza Zafarani. ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online. Syracuse University, 2026, echo.directory.
Stack Exchange, Inc. Stack Exchange — retrocomputing.stackexchange.com. 2024, stackexchange-retrocomputing.echo.directory/.