I’ve done this datavis on arab spring with processing + inkscape and here’s Pablo’s comments
Category: Scraping
Rporres was visiting Cambridge last week, and after listening to one of the online meetings, he decided to jump in the project. By night he had finished the script for grabbing all the newspapers that are available in Kiosko.net. We will need this list soon
You can check the code at https://gist.github.com/2970558 or the output (a csv file with the name, friendly url name, coauntry and country code of all the 377 newspapers) at http://brownbag.me:9001/p/pageonex-kiosko-newspaper-names. It’s written in Perl.
Ahmd had started another similar one in Ruby, but we put it on hold for the short term.
Thanks Rafa for your help!
After the user creates a thread, he selects starting date and end date which could span on more than one month. The problem is that the scraping script works on one month at a time, because I’ve found a difficulty to write a method that can take the start and end date in different months and calculated the number of days between them. Because of that the days at each month changes from one year to another, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do, but it will add some complexity which can be avoid by, asking the user for starting day and end day for each month individuality, and run the script for each individual month.
So any suggestions on how to make this part more easy and conveniente?
issues_dates is the method which calculate the dates and return an array of the dates in this format “YYYY/MM/DD”
Look at the code of this script at https://gist.github.com/2925910
I’ve made some changes to the script to scrape from different sources (http://kiosko.net, http:/nytimes.com, http://elpais.com) and other sources can be added easily, for each source there are two methods, build_source_issues and save_source_issues, the first method is to construct the URI of the issue image based on some pattern which different from source to another, and the other method is to scrape the images and save them on the disk in their specific folders. I’ve wrote some comments to clear some parts of the code.
Note, to scrape from specific source you should comment the others as you can see in the code, for example to scrape from New york Times you should un-comment line 15 and line 32 and comment line 14 and line 31, and also if you want to run the script on https://scraperwiki.com/ you should comment line 3 and don’t try to scrape from elpais because scraperwiki don’t have “RMagick” gem installed.
Information about sources used in the script
Date limits: there are no specific starting date, scraping starting from 2008, but most of the newspapers exist starting from 2011, the script is able to scrape from [2008-2012 ]
Image resolution: [750×1072]
Date limits: first issue available date is 2002/01/24
Image resolution: [348×640] the resolution is not enough for coding!
Date limits: first issue available date is 2012/03/01
Image resolution: [765×1133] the resolution of produced images can be changed!
Script on Github
Ahmd has been working on a scrapper in Ruby for the front Pages at Kiosko.net
I’ve finished the scraping script, and it’s public on https://gist.github.com/2925910 to run the script just pass the file to ruby [ruby scraper.rb] and it will generate the folders (the directories is set for Linux, if you are on Windows you should modify them first), download the images(you can change the variable values in the get_issues method to get different newspapers), and write the log to stdout.
Check the script below.
I’ve also contacted Newseum to see if their “only today” front page data base is avaible for PageOneX.