CITS1401 Computational Thinking with Python
Project 2 Semester 2 2020
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Project 2: How Good (Positive and Patriotic) is Australia?
Submission deadline: 5:00 pm, Friday 23rd October 2020
Value: 20% of CITS1401
To be completed individually.
You should construct a Python 3 program containing your solution to the following
problem and submit your program electronically on Moodle. No other method of
submission is allowed. Your program will be automatically tested on Moodle. Remember
your first two checks against the tester on Moodle will not have any penalty. However
any further check will ca
y 10% penalty per check.
You are expected to have read and understood the University's guidelines on academic
conduct. In accordance with this policy, you may discuss with other students the general
principles required to understand this project, but the work you submit must be the
esult of your own effort. Plagiarism detection, and other systems for detecting potential
malpractice, will therefore be used. Besides, if what you submit is not your own work
then you will have learnt little and will therefore, likely, fail the final exam.
You must submit your project before the submission deadline listed above. Following
UWA policy, a late penalty of 5% will be deducted for each day (or part day), after the
deadline, that the assignment is submitted. No submissions will be allowed after 7 days
following the deadline except approved special consideration cases.
Context:
For this project, imagine for a moment that you have successfully completed your UWA
course and recently taken up a position for the Department of Prime Minister and
Cabinet in Canbe
a with the Australian Federal Government. At first you were quite
eluctant to leave Perth to move ‘over east’ and, more generally, wondered what use a
new graduate with a heavy focus on computing, programming and data could be to this
department. Regardless, the opportunity to gain experience in the ‘real world’ was too
good, and although it is not quite your own multi-million dollar technology start-up,
there was no way you weren’t taking up the offer.
Your first few weeks of orientation was a mostly blur. However, one thing you noticed
was that any time you mentioned your skills in programming, and with Python1 in
particular, to any senior bureaucrat, or even some of the savvier politicians, their eyes
seemed to ‘light up’ and they suddenly became much more interested in whatever you
1 Actually their eyes are more likely to light up if / when you mention your skills in data science and machine
learning and big data, for all of which Python is basically the foundational tool for.
CITS1401 Computational Thinking with Python
Project 2 Semester 2 2020
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were saying to them. After reflecting on these experiences, maybe there would be some
even more interesting opportunities for you in the near future?
However, for now you decide to put aside these, as it’s not like the work that you have
een doing already has not been interesting, and this is what you need to focus on for
today. At an early morning meeting with your immediate supervisor, you were told that
the Government is very interested in reducing its spend on trying to understand what
(and how) the Australian population cu
ently thinks about it. Instead of spending
millions of dollars calling randomised groups of Australian residents every quarter to
ask about their opinions on various Government services, many senior bureaucrats have
wondered for a while now whether there was any way to use the masses of freely
available data on the internet to provide similar insights at a fraction of the cost.
It is within this context that your supervisor has asked you to develop a program, as a
proof-of-concept, to demonstrate that it is possible to provide some of these insights at
a much lower cost. At your meeting your supervisor noted that, for the proof-of-concept
stage, the use of any ‘live’ internet data will not be possible without approval from the
legal team (as well as possibly many others). This seemed like quite an obstacle until
you thought back to one of your early Python units (maybe this one?) and remembered
that there is an open source, freely available corpus collection of billions of recently
crawled websites called the Common Crawl (http:
commoncrawl.org/). More
specifically the Common Crawl corpus consists of tens of thousands of files saved in a
certain format (the WARC format, see below), each of which contains the raw HTML of
tens of thousands of web pages from a web ‘crawl’ performed in the recent past. Being
open source this data is free for you to use so with it you can immediately begin building
your proof-of-concept.
The Project:
As your program is to be a proof-of-concept, both you and your supervisor decided that
its scope should be kept as na
ow as possible (but, of course, it must be
oad enough
so that it can successfully demonstrate some really good insights). For this reason, it
was decided that your program is to focus only on providing four insights only:
1. How ‘positive’ is Australia generally?
2. How ‘positive’ does Australia feel towards their Government specifically?
3. How ‘patriotic’ is Australia compared with two other major English speaking
countries – UK and Canada?
4. What are the most refe
ed-to websites (domains) by all Australian websites
(your team may want to use this information in the future to better understand
how ‘influential’ each Australian web result is to your insights, i.e. highly-refe
ed
to web domains should be counted as more influential, and lowly-refe
ed to web
domains should be counted as less influential).
As outlined in the ‘context’ section, in order to generate these insights (which will be
discussed in greater detail later in this document), your program will need to examine
http:
commoncrawl.org
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Project 2 Semester 2 2020
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the raw HTML from large quantities of Australian web pages, and such information is
available in WARC format from the Common Crawl.
The Common Crawl and WARC format:
The WARC (Web ARChive) format is a standard format for mass storage of large
amounts of ‘web pages’ within a single file. The Common Crawl makes the results of
their crawl freely available for download in this format (as well as the WAT and WET
formats, which will not be used for this project). For this project we will use WARC files
from the August 2020 crawl (https:
commoncrawl.org/2020/08/august-2020-crawl-
archive-now-available/). In order to access these files you need to download the “WARC
files” list – which you can access by clicking on the “CC-MAIN XXXXXXXXXX/warc.paths.gz”
hyperlink in the table in the August 2020 crawl homepage.
Clicking on this link will download an archive, which, when opened, will contain a text
file. Once you open the text file you can download any of the WARC files from the
common crawl by appending https:
commoncrawl.s3.amazonaws.com/ to the front of
any of the lines of this file and pasting this full address into your
owser.
A couple of notes about the Common Crawl WARC files as discussed so far:
• The file list and all Common Crawl WARC files are compressed using gzip. These files
can be unzipped automatically if you are using Linux or Mac OSX. For Windows you
will have to download a free application to do this - try 7-Zip: https:
www.7-
zip.org/.
• The Common Crawl WARC files are very large – approximately 900MB compressed
and up to 5GB uncompressed. Each file contains approximately 45,000 individual
crawl results.
Due to the size of the files above, this project has made available a massively cut down
sample Common Crawl WARC file on LMS as well as Moodle server. It is expected you
will use this file to get familiar with the format and for your (initial) testing of your
project. However, your submission will be tested with other WARC files.
To start getting familiar with WARC files, it is recommended you download the sample
file and open it in a text editor (for Windows, Wordpad performs better; you can also
use Thonny). You will see that a WARC file consists of an overall file header, beginning
with the text “WARC/1.0”, and the next time you see this text is to describe either a
equest (“WARC/1.0\r\nWARC-Type: request”), a response (“WARC/1.0\r\nWARC-
Type: response”) or possibly a metadata or other type of WARC category (e.g.
“WARC/1.0\r\nWARC-Type: metadata”). For this project we are only interested in
WARC responses (“WARC/1.0\r\nWARC-Type: response”), as these are the only
categories that contains the raw HTML data of the web page we are analysing.2
Looking into more detail at WARC responses, you can see that these are further
oken
down into three sections, which are separated by blank lines. The first is the WARC
2 Note the use of ‘\r’ with ‘\n’ to signify a line ending in the WARC (and HTTP) headers. This is a standard line
ending code for text files saved with Microsoft Windows and some other scenarios. You will need to account for
this when processing these headers.
https:
commoncrawl.org/2020/08/august-2020-crawl-archive-now-available
https:
commoncrawl.org/2020/08/august-2020-crawl-archive-now-available
https:
commoncrawl.s3.amazonaws.com
https:
www.7-zip.org
https:
www.7-zip.org
CITS1401 Computational Thinking with Python
Project 2 Semester 2 2020
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esponse header (beginning with “WARC/1.0”). The second is the HTTP header (usually
eginning with “HTTP/1.1 200”) and the third is the raw HTML data (usually but not
necessarily beginning with “”). For the purposes of this project, you
can assume that the first block of text (before the first blank line) is the WARC header,
the second block of text (after the first blank line) is always the HTTP header, and the
third block of text (i.e. anything after the second blank line and before the next
“WARC/1.0” heading) is the raw HTML that we need to analyse.
Taking into account the above, your program will need to be able to open a WARC file,
discard or ignore the overall WARC file header, and then for each result:
1. Extract the URL from the WARC response header (this is stored in the line starting
with