Finding Number of Followers of a Tag in the Data Dump

Question

I'm doing a research on the developers' QAs in Stack Overflow, I have checked Stack Exchange Data Explorer and data dumps but I didn't find number of followers of a tag:

There isn't any related data in "Users" and "Tags". Is there any way to access the data except manually fetching from Tags? (going one by one, hovering etc.)

Answer 1

If Shadow Wizard his guess is correct then this query gives you a javascript scraper that you can run in your browser to get the data you need.

select code
from 
(
select 1 as line , 'var si = [' as code
union 
select  top 10 -- remove this to get all tags
100, '''' + tagname + ''','
from tags
union
select 1000, '''''];'
union
select 1001, 'var i=0; 
var wi=window.setInterval(function(){ 
   if (i<si.length-1) {
     var url=''http://stackoverflow.com/tags/'';
     var entry = ''/subscriber-info'';
     var comp = url + encodeURIComponent(si[i]) + entry;
     var tag = si[i];
     $.get(comp, function(data){ 
        var ami = $(data).find(''span.tm-sub-info'');
        var c3 = ami[0].childNodes[2];
        var c4 = ami[0].childNodes[3];
        var txt = $(c3).text();
        var fol;
        if (txt.indexOf(''follower'')>-1) { 
            fol = parseInt(txt.split('','')[0],10);
        } else {
           fol = parseInt($(c4).attr(''title''),10);
        }
        console.log(tag + '' '' + fol);
     });
     i++;
   } else {
      clearInterval(wi);
   }
 },1000); ' -- lower 1000 until you get throttled
) as allcode
order by line

If run you get the following javascript:

var si = [                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
'.a',                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
'.app',                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
'.aspxauth',                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
'.bash-profile',                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
'.class-file',                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   
'.cs-file',                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
'.doc',                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
'.emf',                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
'.git-info-grafts',                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
'.hgtags',                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
''];                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             
var i=0; 
var wi=window.setInterval(function(){ 
   if (i<si.length-1) {
     var url='http://stackoverflow.com/tags/';
     var entry = '/subscriber-info';
     var comp = url + encodeURIComponent(si[i]) + entry;
     var tag = si[i];
     $.get(comp, function(data){ 
        var ami = $(data).find('span.tm-sub-info');
        var c3 = ami[0].childNodes[2];
        var c4 = ami[0].childNodes[3];
        var txt = $(c3).text();
        var fol;
        if (txt.indexOf('follower')>-1) { 
            fol = parseInt(txt.split(',')[0],10);
        } else {
           fol = parseInt($(c4).attr('title'),10);
        }
        console.log(tag + ' ' + fol);
     });
     i++;
   } else {
      clearInterval(wi);
   }
 },1000); 

which in you can drop in the Developer Console of Chrome (hit F12) and hit enter. Every second (1000 milliseconds) it will fetch the subscriber info for a tag and output the number of followers in the console:

With almost 50,000 tags this will take a while to run to completion... but that is still under 6 to 8 weeks...

Answer 2

In the following paper, authors collected Stack Overflow's tags. The data is available here.

M. Yazdaninia, D. Lo, and A. Sami. "Characterization and Prediction of Questions without Accepted Answers on Stack Overflow", in Proceedings of the 29th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2021)