Harrison Brown (Work Log)

Harrison Brown Work Logs (log page)

Fall 2017 Work

09/07/2017 2:20pm-3:50pm - Set Up Work Log Pages, Slack, Microsoft Remote Desktop

09/11/2017 1pm-5pm - Met with Dr. Egan and got assigned project. Set Up Project Page USITC, Started Coding in Python for the Web Crawler. Look in McNair/Projects/UISTC for project notes and code.

09/13/2017 1pm-3:50pm - Worked on parsing the USITC website Section 337 Notices. Nearly have all of the data I can scrape. Scraper works, but there are a few edges cases where information in the tables are part of a Notice but do not have Investigation Numbers. Will finish this hopefully next time. Also added my USITC project to the projects page I did not have it linked

09/14/2017 1pm-3:50pm - Have a python program that can scrape the entire webpage and navigate through all of the pages that contain section 337 documents. You can see these files and more information on the USITC project page. It can pull all of the information that is in the HTML that can be gathered for each case. The PDFs now need to be scraped; will start work on that next time. Generated a csv file with more than 4000 entries from the webpage. There is a small edge case I need to fix where the entry does not contain the Investigation No.

09/18/2017 1pm-5:00pm - Added features to python program to pull the dates in numerical form. Worked on pulling the PDFs from the website. Currently working on pulling them in Python. The program can run and pull PDFs on my local machine but it doesn't work on the Remote Desktop. I will work on this next time.

09/20/2017 1pm- 3:50pm - Got connected to the database server and mounted the drive onto my computer. Got the list of all the PDFS on the website and started a shell script on the database server to download all of the PDFs. I will leave it running overnight hopefully it completes by tomorrow.

09/20/2017 1pm- 2:30pm - Shell program did not work. Create Python program that can catch all exceptions (url does not exist, lost connection, and improperly formatted url) Hopefully it will complete with no problems. This program is found in the database server under the USITC folder.

09/25/2017 1pm- 5:00pm - Got 3000 PDFS downloaded. Script works. Completed a task to get emails for people who had written papers about economics and entrepreneurship. Started work on pasring the PDFS to text

09/27/2017 1pm- 3:50pm - Got the PDFS parsed to text. Some of the formatting is off will need to determine if data can still be gathered.

09/28/2017 1pm- 3:50pm - Helped Christy with set up on Postgres server. Looked through text documents to see what information I could gather. Looked at Stanford NLTK library for extracting the respondents from the documents.

10/02/2017 1pm- 5:00pm - Started work with ArcGIS. Got the data with startups from Houston into the ArcGIS application. For notes see McNair/Porject/Agglomeration

10/04/2017 1pm- 3:50pm - Worked with Peter on connecting ArcGIS to the database and displaying different points in ArcGIS

10/05/2017 1pm- 3:50pm - Made photos for the requested maps in ArcGIS with Peter and Jeemin.

       To access:
       Go to E:\McNair\Projects\Agglomeration\HarrisonPeterWorkArcGIS
        The photos can be found in there
       To generate the photos open ArcMap with the beginMapArc file
       To generate a PNG Click, File, Export to export the photos
       To adjust the data right click on the table name in the layers lab, and hit properties, then query builder

10/11/2017 1pm- 3:50pm - Started to use NLTK library for gathering information to extract respondents. See code in Projects/USITC/ProcessingTexts

10/16/2017 1pm - 5:00pm - NLTK

• NLTK Information
  • Need to convert text to ascii. Had issues with my PDF texts and had to convert
  • Can use sent_tokenize() function to split document into sentences, easier that regular expressions
  • Use pos_tag() to tag the sentences. This can be used to extract proper nouns
    • Trying to figure out how to use this to grab location data from these documents
  • Worked with Peter to try to extract geographic information from the documents. We looked into tools Geograpy and GeoText. Geograpy does not have the functionality that we would like. GeoText looks to be better but we have issues with dependencies. Will try to resolve these next time.