Communications

Research conversations happen across a fragmented landscape of messaging platforms. Slack workspaces expire, Telegram groups lose history, and email threads scatter across individual inboxes.

This section catalogs tools that extract conversations from these platforms and archive them into git-annex/DataLad repositories, preserving both the content and its structure (threads, reactions, attachments, metadata).

Platforms Covered #

Slack – Corporate messaging widely used in research labs and collaborations. Free workspaces have message retention limits, making archival urgent. See slackdump and wayslack2 for different approaches.

Telegram – Popular for informal research communities and conference groups. See Telegram Archive and tg-archive.

Matrix – Federated, open-source messaging used by several open-source and research communities. See con/versations for DataLad-native Matrix archival, and matrix-archive for standalone export.

Mattermost – Self-hosted team chat common in institutions that need on-premises messaging. See Mattermost Export for bulk export approaches.

Email – The oldest and most universal research communication medium. Tools like offlineimap and mbsync can synchronize mailboxes locally for git-annex archival.

Common Patterns #

Most communication archival tools follow a similar workflow:

1. Authenticate with the platform API (token, OAuth, or session cookie)
2. Export messages, threads, and attachments in a structured format (JSON, YAML, mbox)
3. Import the exported data into a git or git-annex repository
4. Optionally render to static HTML for browsing

The key differentiator is integration depth – some tools produce DataLad datasets directly, while others require manual import steps.