James A. Rising

If you’re like me, you have a pile of Google Scholar Alerts that you never manage to read. It’s a reflection of a more general problem: how do you find good articles, when there are so many articles to sift through?

I’ve recently started using Sux0r, a Bayesian filtering RSS feed reader. However, Google Scholar sends alerts to one’s email, and we’ll want to extract each paper as a separate RSS item.

Here’s my process, and the steps for doing it yourself:

Google Scholar Alerts → IFTTT → Blogger → Perl → DreamHost → RSS → Bayesian Reader

1. Create a Blogger blog that you will just use for Google Scholar Alerts: Go to the Blogger Home Page and follow the steps under “New Blog”.
2. Sign up for IFTTT (if you don’t already have an account), and create a new recipe to post emails from scholaralerts-noreply@google.com to your new blog. The channel for the trigger is your email system (Gmail for me); the trigger is “New email in inbox from…”; the channel for the action is Blogger; and the title and labels can be whatever you want as along as the body is “{{BodyPlain}}” (which includes HTML).

   

3. Modify the Perl code below, pointing it to the front page of your new Blogger blog. It will return an RSS feed when called at the command line (perl scholar.pl).

   

4. Upload the Perl script to your favorite server (mine, https://existencia.org/, is powered by DreamHost.
5. Point your favorite RSS reader to the URL of the Perl script as an RSS feed, and wait as the Google Alerts come streaming in!

Here is the code for the Alert-Blogger-to-RSS Perl script. All you need to do is fill in the $url line below.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI qw(:standard);

use XML::RSS; # Library for RSS generation
use LWP::Simple; # Library for web access

# Download the first page from the blog
my $url = "http://mygooglealerts.blogspot.com/"; ### <-- FILL IN HERE!
my $input = get($url);
my @lines = split /\n/, $input;

# Set up the RSS feed we will fill
my $rss = new XML::RSS(version => '2.0');
$rss->channel(title => "Google Scholar Alerts");

# Iterate through the lines of HTML
my $ii = 0;
while ($ii < $#lines) {
    my $line = $lines[$ii];
    # Look for a <h3> starting the entry
    if ($line !~ /^<h3 style="font-weight:normal/) {
        $ii = ++$ii;
        next;
    }

    # Extract the title and link
    $line =~ /<a href="([^"]+)"><font .*?>(.+)<\/font>/;
    my $title = $2;
    my $link = $1;

    # Extract the authors and publication information
    my $line2 = $lines[$ii+1];
    $line2 =~ /<div><font .+?>([^<]+?) - (.*?, )?(\d{4})/;
    my $authors = $1;
    my $journal = (defined $2) ? $2 : '';
    my $year = $3;

    # Extract the snippets
    my $line3 = $lines[$ii+2];
    $line3 =~ /<div><font .+?>(.+?)<br \/>/;
    my $content = $1;
    for ($ii = $ii + 3; $ii < @lines; $ii++) {
        my $linen = $lines[$ii];
        # Are we done, or is there another line of snippets?
        if ($linen =~ /^(.+?)<\/font><\/div>/) {
            $content = $content . '<br />' . $1;
            last;
        } else {
            $linen =~ /^(.+?)<br \/>/;
            $content = $content . '<br />' . $1;
        }
    }
    $ii = ++$ii;

    # Use the title and publication for the RSS entry title
    my $longtitle = "$title ($authors, $journal $year)";

    # Add it to the RSS feed
    $rss->add_item(title => $longtitle,
                   link => $link,
                   description => $content);
        
    $ii = ++$ii;
}

# Write out the RSS feed
print header('application/xml+rss');
print $rss->as_string;

In Sux0r, here are a couple of items form the final result:

Twitter data– the endless stream of tweets, the user network, and the rise and fall of hashtags– offers a flood of insight into the minute-by-minute state of the society. Or at least one self-selecting part of it. A lot of people want to use it for research, and it turns out to be pretty easy to do so.

You can either purchase twitter data, or collect it in real-time. If you purchase twitter data, it’s all organized for you and available historically, but it basically isn’t anything that you can’t get yourself by monitoring twitter in real-time. I’ve used GNIP, where the going rate was about $500 per million tweets in 2013.

There are two main ways to collect data directly from twitter: “queries” and the “stream”. Queries let you get up to 1000 tweets at any point in time– whichever the most recent tweets that match your search criteria. The stream gives you a fraction of a percent of tweets continuously, which very quickly adds up, based on filtering criteria.

Scripts for doing these two options are below, but you need to decide on the search/streaming criteria. Typically, these are search terms and geographical constraints. See Twitter’s API documentation to decide on your search options.

Twitter uses an athentication system to identify both the individual collecting the data, and what tool is helping them do it. It is easy to register a new tool, whereby you pretend that you’re a startup with a great new app. Here are the steps:

1. Install python’s twitter package, using “easy_install twitter” or “pip install twitter”.
2. Create an app at https://apps.twitter.com/. Leave the callback URL blank, but fill in the rest.
3. Set the CONSUMER_KEY and CONSUMER_SECRET in the code below to the values you get on the keys and access tokens tab of your app.
4. Fill in the name of the application.
5. Fill in any search terms or structured searches you like.
6. If you’re using the downloaded scripts, which output data to a CSV file, change where the file is written, to some directory (where it says “twitter/us_”).
7. Run the script from your computer’s terminal (i.e., python search.py)
8. The script will pop up a browser for you to log into twitter and accept permissions from your app.
9. Get data.

Here is what a simple script looks like:

import os, twitter

APP_NAME = "Your app name"
CONSUMER_KEY = 'Your consumer key'
CONSUMER_SECRET = 'Your consumer token'

# Do we already have a token saved?
MY_TWITTER_CREDS = os.path.expanduser('~/.class_credentials')
if not os.path.exists(MY_TWITTER_CREDS):
    # This will ask you to accept the permissions and save the token
    twitter.oauth_dance(APP_NAME, CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET,
                        MY_TWITTER_CREDS)

# Read the token
oauth_token, oauth_secret = twitter.read_token_file(MY_TWITTER_CREDS)

# Open up an API object, with the OAuth token
api = twitter.Twitter(api_version="1.1", auth=twitter.OAuth(oauth_token, oauth_secret, CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET))

# Perform our query
tweets = api.search.tweets(q="risky business")

# Print the results
for tweet in tweets['statuses']:
    if not 'text' in tweet:
        continue

    print tweet
    break

For automating twitter collection, I’ve put together scripts for queries (search.py), streaming (filter.py), and bash scripts that run them repeatedly (repsearch.sh and repfilter.sh). Download the scripts.

To use the repetition scripts, make the repetition scripts executable by running “chmod a+x repsearch.sh repfilter.sh“. Then run them, by typing ./repfilter.sh or ./repsearch.sh. Note that these will create many many files over time, which you’ll have to merge together.