Retrospective

A retrospective exhibition presents works from an extended period of an artist's activity. Similarly, a retrospective compilation album is assembled from a recording artist's past material, usually their greatest hits. A television or newsstand special about an actor, politician, or other celebrity will present a retrospective of the subject's career highlights. A leading (usually elderly) academic may be honored with a Festschrift, an honorary book of articles or a lecture series relating topically to a retrospective of the honoree's career. Celebrity roasts good-naturedly mock the career of the guest of honor, often in a retrospective format.

This project seeks to create a 'retrospective' of Google News top hits. Retrospective takes a search term and searches Google News multiple times throughout a specified time range. It then parses this data and outputs a title, summary, image, and link for use in a blog or other project.

Installation

Install requirements

pip install -r requirements.txt

Upgrade Selenium

pip install -U selenium

Install ChromeDriver

Download ChromeDriver

Save to /usr/local/bin/chromedriver

On a Mac, you will need to give security permissions to chromedriver:
cd /usr/local/bin
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine chromedriver

Other OS may have similar procedures.

Once ChromeDriver is installed, Retrospective will keep it up to date with your current Chrome version

Configure AWS CLI

Retrospective sets up and uses AWS EC2 instances as proxies.

You must configure AWS CLI if you haven't already.

Tests

python Retrospective/test.py

Usage

Basic search for bioinformatics (console print out):

python Retrospective/Retrospective.py -t bioinformatics

-t specifies search term

Add articles to blog:

python Retrospective/Retrospective.py --repo /Users/my-user/my-website -t bioinformatics -c /content/blog -i /static/images --write-framework hugo

--repo specifies absolute directory of your blog or website

-c specifies the content path - i.e. where the blog posts live

-i specifies the image path - i.e. where the images live

--write-framework specifies the framework that retrospective creates posts for. Options are only 'hugo' and None. None will print output.

Adjust time period, window, and span:

python Retrospective/Retrospective.py -t bioinformatics -s 2 -p 6 -w 8

-s specifies time span in which the total search takes place, in years. Specifying 2 will search up to 2 years in the past. Default is 2.

-p specifies time period in which separate queries will take place, in months. Specifying 6 will create a new search every 6 months for the entire span. Default is 6.

-w specifies Time window in which individual queries take place, in weeks. Specifying 8 will look at all articles over an 8 week period for every individual search as specifies by the period and span. Default is 8.

From Config

Retrospective automatically populates a config file (retrospective.json by default) within the specified repository. This is intended to save your previous searches so that retrospective can be easily rerun and updated at a future time.

The --from-config option will carry out all previous searches saved in the config file, updated for the current date. You can manually edit the json file if you want to add more searches. This is the easiest way to manage using retrospective in a blog.

Example:

python Retrospective/Retrospective.py --repo /Users/my-user/my-website -c /content/blog -i /static/images --write-framework hugo --from-config