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castarter

castarter - Content Analysis Starter Toolkit for the R programming language - facilitates text mining and web scraping by taking care of many of the most common file management and parsing issues. It keeps tracks of download advancement in a local database, facilitates extraction through dedicated convenience functions, and allows for basic exploration of textual corpora through a Shiny interface.

Key features

castarter aims to streamline the process of aquiring textual contents retrieved online and transforming them into a structured format ready to be analysed. It can also be used for scraping data or for consistently downloading files.

It facilitates many of the tasks that often pose an excessive hurdle for beginners and are unnecessarily time consuming even for experienced users:

  • creating list of URLs from sections of a website
  • extracting links from index pages
  • managing the download process by
    • ensuring pages are downloaded only once
    • managing the creation of folders and subfolders
    • keeping a log of the download process for reporting
  • extracting text and metadata from the downloaded files, including support for different formats, including html (default), json, xml, and csv
  • keeping extracted text in a database in order to allow further analysis even if the resulting dataset is larger than available memory
  • keeping a textual dataset updated
  • sharing a textual dataset with the wider public through a web interface that enables basic analaysis of the corpus
  • conducting basic quality and sanity checks on the textual dataset
  • exporting the dataset to common formats
  • making backup of files, and storing them to a remote location
  • producing reports about the download process, including basic summary statistics

This package allows for many custom options for advanced users, but is still opinionated about how a typical workflow looks like and about the likely user preferences. More broadly, a core idea is that reliability is more important than speed, as more advanced users can process or export data with their own custom solutions.

Funding and disclaimers

castarter is a more modern, fully-featured, and consistent iteration of a previous package with the same name, now castarter.legacy.

Since then, it has been developed as a personal endeavour, as a professional project at OBCT/CCI, as well as within the scope of various initiatives, including:

Each line of support enabled an increased feature set, the creation of example, an extension to a wider range of use cases, and the writing of documentation.

Installation

You can install castarter with:

remotes::install_github(repo = "giocomai/castarter", dependencies = TRUE)

If this does not work or you have issues, consider using just:

remotes::install_github(repo = "giocomai/castarter")

if you intend to use castarter to manage download and extraction of contents or data from files, but not for their further analysis.

This latter option may also be helpful on some operating systems, including some Linux versions, where installing arrow may be time-consuming or may not work. Indeed, for its corpus-processing functions, castarter effectively depends on the arrow package, which allows for memory-efficient processing of datasets. It is however only included among suggested packages, as its installation may not be straightforward on some systems, and because it is not necessary for most castarter functions.

arrow’s own documentation has a dedicated page for troubleshooting its installation. In my experience, the more consistently successful approach relies on a custom install script advertised in the above page by the package developers. It can be run as follows:

source("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apache/arrow/main/r/R/install-arrow.R")
install_arrow()

Workflow and how-to

Detailed documentation of workflow and on how to deal with various scenarios is only partly available.

To get an idea of how castarter works you should check out the Key concepts article (also included below for reference) and have a look at one of the workflow examples.

Workflow examples

  • a full walkthrough of extracting textual contents on a website, with code and a detailed explanation of the process
  • an additional example, with full code but only partial explanation of the process

Step-by-step

The section on key concepts is also included in this readme below.

Key concepts

Project and website

One of the first issues that appear when starting a text mining or web scraping project relates to the issue of managing files and folder. castarter defaults to an opinionated folder structure that should work for most projects. It also facilitates downloading files (skipping previously downloaded files) and ensuring consistent and unique matching between a downloaded html, its source url, and data extracted from them. Finally, it facilitates archiving and backuping downloaded files and scripts.

The folder structure is based on two levels:

  • project
  • website

A project may include one or more websites. It is an intermediate level added to keep files in order, as the number of processed websites increased.

Let’s clarify with an example. Let’s suppose I want to do some text minining of websites related to the European Union. The name of the project will be european_union, and within that project I may be gathering contents from different websites, e.g. “european_commission”, “european_parliament”, “european_council”, etc.

library("castarter")
cas_set_options(
  base_folder = fs::path(fs::path_temp(), "castarter_data"),
  project = "european_union",
  website = "european_commission"
)

Assuming that my project on the European Union involves text mining the website of the European Council, the European Commission, and the European Parliament, the folder structure may look something like this:

#> /tmp/RtmpwmPz20/castarter_data
#> └── european_union
#>     ├── european_commission
#>     ├── european_council
#>     └── european_parliament

In brief, castarter_data is the base folder where I can store all of my text mining projects. european_union is the name of the project, while all others are the names of the specific websites I will source. Folders will be created automatically as needed when you start downloading files.

When text mining or scraping, it is common to gather quickly many thousands of file, and keeping them in good order is fundamental, particularly in the long term. Hence, a preliminary suggestion: depending on how you usually work and keep your files backed-up it may make sense to keep your scripts in a folder that is live-synced (e.g. with services such as Dropbox, Nextcloud, or Google Drive). It however rarely make sense to live-sync tens or hundreds of thousands of files as you proceed with your scraping. You may want to keep this in mind as you set the base_folder with cas_set_options().

castarter stores details about the download process in a database. By default, this is stored locally in RSQlite database kept in the same folder as website files, but it can be stored in a different folder, or alternative database backends such as MySQL can also be used.

Index pages and content pages

castarter starts with the idea that there are basically two types of pages that are commonly found when text mining.

index pages. These are pages that usually include some form of list of the pages with actual contents we are interested in (or, possibly, a second layer of index pages). They can be immutable, but they are often expected to change. For example, the news archive of the official website of Russia’s president is reachable via url such as the following:

This is a structure that is common to many websites. In such cases, if we intend to keep our text mining efforts up to date, we usually would want to download the first such pages again and again, as long as we find new links that are not in our previous dataset.

content pages. These are pages that include the actual content we are interested in. These have urls such as:

Some section of the page may change, but our default expectation is that the part of the page we are interested in does not change. Unless we have some specific reason to do otherwise, we usually need to download such pages only once.

Interactive exploration of textual datasets

Check out castarter’s interactive web interface for exploring corpora.

library("castarter")
remotes::install_github("giocomai/tifkremlinen")
cas_explorer(
  corpus = tifkremlinen::kremlin_en,
  default_pattern = "Syria, Crimea"
)

Technical details about the implementation

Database structure

See vignette("castarter-database")

Shiny modules

See vignette("castarter-shiny-modules")

Forthcoming features

  • comprehensive documentation
  • make castarter download files in the background (e.g. with callr, or rstudio jobs)
  • more options for analysis: peaks, periods, etc.

Coding conventions and package design principles

Function naming conventions:

  • functions should start with the prefix cas_ and should be followed my a verb
  • functions that call Shiny apps start with the prefix cass_, with the additional s referring to Shiny
  • empty datasets demonstrating the expected output of functions retrieving data from databases start with casdb_empty_

Long term, the package should follow best practices as described in Tidy Design Principles, including in particular:

License

castarter is released with a MIT license.