Brightbeam is a continuation/fork of Mozilla Lightbeam, a Firefox extension made to "help users understand the array of first and third party companies people interact with every day across the Web".
While active, it keeps track of what sites you visit, and what external content those sites load. Known trackers can be identified and the aggregate data can be exported to study with external tools like Gephi.
Lightbeam was discontinued by Mozilla in 2017. Because its functionality is quite useful for people who wish to research trackers (rather than block them), Brightbeam seeks to build upon Lightbeam to offer functionality specifically for that purpose.
Brightbeam is in active development. .xpi files of work-in-progress versions are available on the releases page. These are signed and can be installed in any Firefox-based browser. If you want to run the latest development version instead, you can do so from the Firefox debugging console.
Note that we are not able to include the full tracker database (trackers.json) in this Github repository. The format is however straightforward and it should be easy to adapt your own database of trackers to it.
Brightbeam was developed on top of Lightbeam by Stijn Peeters for the Digital Methods Initiative and is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, 2.0. Refer to the LICENSE file for more information.