FCC Forensics

Determine public opinion on net neutrality issue via sourcing and sentiment analysis of FCC comments.

Based on https://github.com/csinchok/fcc-comment-analysis, plus more from Ragtag volunteers

Uses Elasticsearch to get data from FCC's public API

Queries

• analysis.titleii from regex patterns
• analysis.sentiment_sig_terms_ordered from significant terms
• query by source AWS Lambda
• tag_by_query.py

Local setup

Make sure you have python3

Set up a local Elasticsearch server: https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch

Set up fcc-comment-analysis:

$ cd server
$ pip install -e .
$ python setup.py test

Create the index with mappings:

$ fcc create

Fetch and index some data from the FCC API:

$ fcc index --endpoint=http://localhost:9200/ -g 2017-06-01

Analyze data and add to analysis section of documents:

$ fcc analyze --endpoint=http://localhost:9200/ --limit 40000

Set up a local Kibana server: https://www.elastic.co/downloads/kibana

Play in Kibana:

• go to http://localhost:5601
• go to Management / Configure an index pattern
  • Index name or pattern: fcc-comments
  • Index contains time-based events
  • Time-field name: date_dissemenated
  • Create

Contribute!

Production setup

Set up cloud-hosted Elasticsearch:

• read-only user for queries
• read-write user for ingest and analyze
• get ES_URL like https://user:password@hostname:port

Load current dataset into index:

• create index: fcc create --endpoint=$ES_URL
• fetch comments from FCC and add to index: fcc index --endpoint=$ES_URL -g 2017-05-01 (restart as needed if/when API times out)
• run static analyzers, 100k at a time: fcc analyze --endpoint=$ES_URL --limit 100000 (repeat until all docs have analyzed: curl '$ES_URL/_count?pretty' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d'{"query":{"bool":{"must_not":{"exists":{"field":"analysis"}}}}}')

Create AWS Lambda to refresh data:

• TODO

Create AWS Lambda to proxy Elasticsearch queries:

• cd server/fcc_analysis
• zip -r ../lambda.zip . --exclude experiments/* --exclude *.csv --exclude *.txt
• cd $VIRTUAL_ENV/lib/python3.6/site-packages
• zip -r path/to/server/lambda.zip .
• upload to AWS; set handler to lambda.query_by_source

Create AWS API Gateway to proxy Lambda function