NewsAnalyzer

Intro

This software tool allows to extract big collections of Twitter news-sharing users, their news tweets and the full data structure of the shared articles.

The application is automatic and self-powered so that it can be run for indefinitely long sessions.

Installation Guide

Requirements

• Python (>3.4.0) and pip
• MongoDB
• Twitter API keys
• (optional) Face++ keys

Setting up the application

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/DataSciencePolimi/NewsAnalyzer.git

Inside the project folder initialize a python environment

virtualenv newsanalyzer-env

Activate it

source newsanalyzer-env/bin/activate

The install the requirements

pip install -r requirements.txt

Setting up keystore

If you don't have yet, obtain Twitter API credentials

Open credential.json and fill the values with your keys:

{
    "consumer_key" : "<twitter API consumer key>",
    "consumer_secret" : "<twitter API consumer secret>",
    "access_token" : "<twitter API access token>",
    "access_token_secret" : "<twitter API access token secret>",
    "faceplus_key" : "<face++ key (optional)>",
    "faceplus_secret" : "<face++ secret (optional)>"
}

Setting up database

1. Download and install MongoDB
2. Run command mongod to start a MongoDB server on localhost (may require priviledges)
3. Run setup.py script inside application folder

Running the pipeline

In order to start collecting users, tweets and articles your database need to contain at least one article entity to feed the recursive pipeline.

You can run utils/get_seeds.py to get a set of initial seeds or you can download our pre-collected dataset.

Then run main_pipeline.py