Chanalysis scrips (beta)

The chanalysis Python scripts in this repository offer a convenient approach to map trends, shifts, and other characteristics with 4chan data, or any data with a similar structure. The scripts can help moving beyond the consideration of the anonymous imageboard as an un-researchable and homogeneous blob.

Note that these scripts are a work in progress and may contain bugs.

The current chanalysis scripts include:

1. createHistogram.py Frequency histograms: Visualise the occurances of a particular word over time
2. getReplies.py Identifying popular posts: Show which posts are most replied to and thus garnered attention.
3. createTokens.py Tokenization: Tokenise the text (lemmatization and stemming).
4. createLongString.py Creating a text file: Takes text in a csv column and outputs as a long text in a .txt file. Useful in tandem with jasondavies.com/wordtree/.
5. getImages.py Downloading images: Download images from a set of posts
6. createImageWall.py Making an image wall: Use downloaded images to create an image wall.
7. getTfidf.py Get popular terms: (work in progress) Outputs popular words in the dataset via tf-idf.

More scripts will be added later.

Usage

The scripts require Python 3. Once you have installed Python 3 on your computer, clone or download this repository. Go to the folder of the scrips in a terminal and install the requirements (python -m pip install -r requirements.txt). When executing the scripts (e.g. python3 createLongString.py) without parameters, it will show the functions and various options. Run the scripts e.g. like so: python createLongString.py --source=input/star-wars.csv.

All the resulting data files are saved in the output/ folder.