Crowd

This Command Line Interface(CLI) tool accesses the CrowdTangle REST API, accesses posts, the leaderboard and the link-checker, stores the data in CSV file and pushes the files into a Google BigQuery database by creating a new table or appending if a table with the same schema exists

Local installation

You must have access to the CrowdTangle dashboard, read access to Google BigQuery Project and the credential file for the tool to write to BigQuery.

Environment requirements

• HomeBrew Package Management Command Line Interface to install, update and manage software on MacOS
• Git Version control system to collaborate as well as to clone the public repos or repos with at least reading access.
• Python Python 3.8.5
• Anaconda To create an environment in which all the dependencies/libraries for this CLI tool are installed.

Using Crowd for the first time

• Create conda environment, remember the name of your environment to activate it everytime you like to use this tool.

conda init
conda create --name <replace_this> python=3.8
conda activate <replace_this>   

• Clone the code from git repository

git clone https://github.com/qut-dmrc/Crowd.git
cd Crowd
pip install -r requirements.txt

• You need to have a config file in Crowd folder in order to run script
  • Create a your_config.yml file, different example yaml files are provided in config_template folder accordingly for different endpoints. Please refer to Config Templates section to select the right template for you
  • Select the template for your case, copy and paste it your_config.yml
  • Get the API access token from the dashboard setting and paste it in token
  • Set the history to True if you like to include the counts of emoji interactions over different timestep
  • Set togbq to True if you like to push your data to Bigquery
  • Store the credential file in the Crowd folder, and set the bq_credential to <your_credential_file>.json Creating service account to get the credential file
  • Set your search terms or links and the rest of configuaration accordingly to your query.
• Build the CLI pip install -e .
• Run the CLI tool to gather your data using the commands in Usage section.

Config Templates

• config_links.yml: Links endpoint will retrieve a set of posts matching a certain link.
• config_search_terms.yml: This template will search via posts\search endpoint, search_terms MUST be included to retrieve posts that match the search terms in the entire CT database. Search range can be futhered refined by list(s) of accounts and a time frame.
• config_no_search_term.yml: This template will search via posts endpoint, it serves similar purpose to that of posts/search endpoint except for that search_term can be left blank to curate all the posts from list(s) of accounts within/without a certain time range.
• config_post.yml: This template is to collect data for specific post(s) by their post id(s) for further investigation.

Parameters

### Leave a parameter unchanged if it's not applicable for your search
token: ""                            API Token could be acquired from your dashboard
start_date : null                    Retrieve posts from this point onwards
end_date: null                       Retrieve posts no later than this date time
output_filename: null                The output csv file name for all the posts curated
search_terms: null                   "taco pizza bread" will retrieve posts including all of these words. "taco,pizza,bread" will retrive any of these words.
AND_terms: null                      Terms that must be included on top of the search terms 
NOT_terms: null                      Posts matching the search_terms above with these NOT_terms will not be included in the final search result.
lists: null                          Lists created in CT dashboard for grouping different accounts together to retrive the posts only from these lists.
accounts: null                       Similar to lists, but individual account ids.
page_admin_country: null             To filter posts whose page admins' countries match the countries provided. E.g "AU"  
history: false                       Set it to true to includes timestep data for growth of each post returned in terms of interaction counts.
togbq: false                         Set it to true if you like to store the result in Big Query(BQ)                                  
bq_credential: "xxx.json"            The credential file to push to a dataset in your BQ project
bq_table_id: "dataset_id.table_id "  The name of the dataset and table to store your data. Dataset must exist in Big Query. Table will be created on the fly.
downloadMedia:False                   Change it to True should you wish to download media from media urls

Using Crowd Subsequently

• Activate the environment conda activate <your_env_name>
• [Optional] If you like to have separate tables for list data in BigQuery git checkout tableflattening
• [Optional] Run it every time there is a new change to the code pip install -e .
• Edit the yaml file for your query.
• crowd -c <your_config>.yml

Install New Release of the Code

git stash
git pull
git stash pop

Follow the steps in # Using Crowd Subsequently # to use the tool.

Usage

Command Line

$ Crowd
Usage: crowd [OPTIONS]

Commands:
  crowd [OPTIONS]      searches the entire, cross-platform CrowdTangle system of posts

OPTIONS
  -c/--config          A config file associated with a query                           [string][default:default_query.yml]
  --help

Examples:
  1. crowd -c "myquery.yml"                        Run the query with params set in "myquery.yml"
  2. crowd -c "myquery.yml" -a                     Append to the csv file stated in myquery.yml file


Source code available at https://github.com/qut-dmrc/Crowd.git