[REVIEW]: Finnish Media Scrapers

[whedon]

Submitting author: @jiemakel (Eetu Mäkelä)
Repository: https://github.com/hsci-r/finnish-media-scrapers
Version: v1.1.1
Editor: @ajstewartlang
Reviewers: @Sara-ShiHo, @GaurangTandon
Archive: 10.5281/zenodo.5796453

⚠️ JOSS reduced service mode ⚠️

Due to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, JOSS is currently operating in a "reduced service mode". You can read more about what that means in our blog post.

Status

Status badge code:

HTML: <a href="https://joss.theoj.org/papers/0bdd0f947b2d986b4acc4b9b6737dde8"><img src="https://joss.theoj.org/papers/0bdd0f947b2d986b4acc4b9b6737dde8/status.svg"></a>
Markdown: [![status](https://joss.theoj.org/papers/0bdd0f947b2d986b4acc4b9b6737dde8/status.svg)](https://joss.theoj.org/papers/0bdd0f947b2d986b4acc4b9b6737dde8)

Reviewers and authors:

Please avoid lengthy details of difficulties in the review thread. Instead, please create a new issue in the target repository and link to those issues (especially acceptance-blockers) by leaving comments in the review thread below. (For completists: if the target issue tracker is also on GitHub, linking the review thread in the issue or vice versa will create corresponding breadcrumb trails in the link target.)

Reviewer instructions & questions

@Sara-ShiHo & @pmyteh, please carry out your review in this issue by updating the checklist below. If you cannot edit the checklist please:

1. Make sure you're logged in to your GitHub account
2. Be sure to accept the invite at this URL: https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/invitations

The reviewer guidelines are available here: https://joss.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reviewer_guidelines.html. Any questions/concerns please let @ajstewartlang know.

✨ Please start on your review when you are able, and be sure to complete your review in the next six weeks, at the very latest ✨

Review checklist for @Sara-ShiHo

Conflict of interest

• I confirm that I have read the JOSS conflict of interest (COI) policy and that: I have no COIs with reviewing this work or that any perceived COIs have been waived by JOSS for the purpose of this review.

Code of Conduct

• I confirm that I read and will adhere to the JOSS code of conduct.

General checks

• Repository: Is the source code for this software available at the repository url?
• License: Does the repository contain a plain-text LICENSE file with the contents of an OSI approved software license?
• Contribution and authorship: Has the submitting author (@jiemakel) made major contributions to the software? Does the full list of paper authors seem appropriate and complete?
  • Author @jiemakel has made 77 commits, 39,314 ++ lines, 6,319 -- deletions.
• Substantial scholarly effort: Does this submission meet the scope eligibility described in the JOSS guidelines
  • There are two authors with contributions over at least six months.
  • There are 1,263 lines of code.
  • According to the JOSS draft, this package has been used by two other projects (what are these projects?)

Functionality

• Installation: Does installation proceed as outlined in the documentation?

• Functionality: Have the functional claims of the software been confirmed?

  • Check these:
  • Query YLE/HS/IL/IS APIs for matching articles using the scripts fms-query-{yle|hs|il|is}, which output all matching articles with links into CSVs.
  • Fetch the matching articles using fms-fetch-{hs|open}. These save the articles as HTML files in a specified directory.
  • Extract the plain text from the article HMTL using fms-html-to-text-{yle|svyle|hs|il|is}.
  • Optionally refilter the results using fms-post-filter.

• Performance: If there are any performance claims of the software, have they been confirmed? (If there are no claims, please check off this item.)

  • There are no performance claims in the JOSS draft. See author's comment below on performance

Documentation

• A statement of need: Do the authors clearly state what problems the software is designed to solve and who the target audience is?
  • Problems being solved: "responds to research needs by providing easy-to-use tools for scraping Finnish media articles and extracting the article texts from the scraped HTML files."
  • The target audience for this project is those in media research who need access to this data. The python package itself is "for the benefit of more computationally-savvy users" and the "Finish Computational Science community".
• Installation instructions: Is there a clearly-stated list of dependencies? Ideally these should be handled with an automated package management solution.
  • These is an explicit list of dependencies in poetry.lock
  • The necessary dependencies are installed with pip install
• Example usage: Do the authors include examples of how to use the software (ideally to solve real-world analysis problems).
  • Members of Parliament Example:
  • Helsingin Sanomat
  • Yle
  • Iltalehti
  • Iltasanomat
  • fms-post-filter script
• Functionality documentation: Is the core functionality of the software documented to a satisfactory level (e.g., API method documentation)?
• Automated tests: Are there automated tests or manual steps described so that the functionality of the software can be verified?
  • There are no automated tests due to the reliance on external APIs. Instead, any problems should show through logging. See author's explanation below.
• Community guidelines: Are there clear guidelines for third parties wishing to 1) Contribute to the software 2) Report issues or problems with the software 3) Seek support
  • I don't think there are clear guidelines aside from the fact that anyone can open a GitHub Issue. EDIT: this has been updated in commit __. In short, all support/contributions can be through GitHub.

Software paper

• Summary: Has a clear description of the high-level functionality and purpose of the software for a diverse, non-specialist audience been provided?
• A statement of need: Does the paper have a section titled 'Statement of Need' that clearly states what problems the software is designed to solve and who the target audience is?
  • Yes, there is a section titled 'Statement of Need'
  • The types of problems are: media research
  • The target audience is: researchers, Finnish computational science community
• State of the field: Do the authors describe how this software compares to other commonly-used packages?
  • There are no named comparable packages, but the Statement of Need addresses the media research field which might use this package.
  • EDIT: a Related work section has been added to the README.
• Quality of writing: Is the paper well written (i.e., it does not require editing for structure, language, or writing quality)?
• References: Is the list of references complete, and is everything cited appropriately that should be cited (e.g., papers, datasets, software)? Do references in the text use the proper citation syntax?

Review checklist for @pmyteh

Conflict of interest

• I confirm that I have read the JOSS conflict of interest (COI) policy and that: I have no COIs with reviewing this work or that any perceived COIs have been waived by JOSS for the purpose of this review.

Code of Conduct

• I confirm that I read and will adhere to the JOSS code of conduct.

General checks

• Repository: Is the source code for this software available at the repository url?
• License: Does the repository contain a plain-text LICENSE file with the contents of an OSI approved software license?
• Contribution and authorship: Has the submitting author (@jiemakel) made major contributions to the software? Does the full list of paper authors seem appropriate and complete?
• Substantial scholarly effort: Does this submission meet the scope eligibility described in the JOSS guidelines

Functionality

• Installation: Does installation proceed as outlined in the documentation?
• Functionality: Have the functional claims of the software been confirmed?
• Performance: If there are any performance claims of the software, have they been confirmed? (If there are no claims, please check off this item.)

Documentation

• A statement of need: Do the authors clearly state what problems the software is designed to solve and who the target audience is?
• Installation instructions: Is there a clearly-stated list of dependencies? Ideally these should be handled with an automated package management solution.
• Example usage: Do the authors include examples of how to use the software (ideally to solve real-world analysis problems).
• Functionality documentation: Is the core functionality of the software documented to a satisfactory level (e.g., API method documentation)?
• Automated tests: Are there automated tests or manual steps described so that the functionality of the software can be verified?
• Community guidelines: Are there clear guidelines for third parties wishing to 1) Contribute to the software 2) Report issues or problems with the software 3) Seek support

Software paper

• Summary: Has a clear description of the high-level functionality and purpose of the software for a diverse, non-specialist audience been provided?
• A statement of need: Does the paper have a section titled 'Statement of Need' that clearly states what problems the software is designed to solve and who the target audience is?
• State of the field: Do the authors describe how this software compares to other commonly-used packages?
• Quality of writing: Is the paper well written (i.e., it does not require editing for structure, language, or writing quality)?
• References: Is the list of references complete, and is everything cited appropriately that should be cited (e.g., papers, datasets, software)? Do references in the text use the proper citation syntax?

Review checklist for @GaurangTandon

Conflict of interest

• I confirm that I have read the JOSS conflict of interest (COI) policy and that: I have no COIs with reviewing this work or that any perceived COIs have been waived by JOSS for the purpose of this review.

Code of Conduct

• I confirm that I read and will adhere to the JOSS code of conduct.

General checks

• Repository: Is the source code for this software available at the repository url?
• License: Does the repository contain a plain-text LICENSE file with the contents of an OSI approved software license?
• Contribution and authorship: Has the submitting author (@jiemakel) made major contributions to the software? Does the full list of paper authors seem appropriate and complete?
• Substantial scholarly effort: Does this submission meet the scope eligibility described in the JOSS guidelines
  • Several commits, useful project to academic community studying finnish media, over 1000 LOC of Python

Functionality

• Installation: Does installation proceed as outlined in the documentation?
  • installed via pypi, installed easily
• Functionality: Have the functional claims of the software been confirmed?
  • --help works as expected
  • fms-query-il is broken it seems, rest of the tools work (I ran this command: fms-query-{yle|hs|il|is} --from-date 2021-01-01 -q 'parliament' -l 10 -o results2.csv). I got a TypeError for -il.
  • did not check the other three components yet
• Performance: If there are any performance claims of the software, have they been confirmed? (If there are no claims, please check off this item.)
  • Software's primary bottleneck is not burdening remote servers, therefore, there is a limit on how fast they can be. Regardless, as I understand it, this is a Python script designed more for convenience rather than performance or scalability. Therefore, I see no need for extra efforts in this direction.

Documentation

• A statement of need: Do the authors clearly state what problems the software is designed to solve and who the target audience is?
  • A clear statement of need is given and target audience (Finnish HSRG) and problem statement (crawl Finnish media text) is given
  • I think it is tradition to also compare one's work with other existing work in the field :-) It would be good to at least mention that no other existing software can possibly be repurposed to perform the same task with the same level of efficiency, as this project directly uses APIs and also extracts structured text, which other softwares will possibly not.
  • There is a related work section in the README but I think a gist of it should still be mentioned in the paper.
• Installation instructions: Is there a clearly-stated list of dependencies? Ideally these should be handled with an automated package management solution.
  • pip is used to install as an end user and poetry as a developer, both are pretty standard.
• Example usage: Do the authors include examples of how to use the software (ideally to solve real-world analysis problems).
  • Many examples, also an example members_of_parliament folder is available.
• Functionality documentation: Is the core functionality of the software documented to a satisfactory level (e.g., API method documentation)?
  • Simple flowchart plus explanatory statements are given.
• Automated tests: Are there automated tests or manual steps described so that the functionality of the software can be verified?
  • Added a comment about this below ([REVIEW]: Finnish Media Scrapers #3504 (comment))
• Community guidelines: Are there clear guidelines for third parties wishing to 1) Contribute to the software 2) Report issues or problems with the software 3) Seek support
  • lead author's email is provided for contact

Software paper

• Summary: Has a clear description of the high-level functionality and purpose of the software for a diverse, non-specialist audience been provided?
  • Summary is probably too short and vague. The first step in this project is keyword search but it's not mentioned in the summary. Perhaps a line or two can be added about "structured retrieval" as well. I would begin with something like "Finnish Media Scrapers is a package for retrieving articles in a structured form from Finnish Media websites. It allows flexible configuration in terms of start date/end date and/or keyword search." and then continue to explain what is meant by 1. retrieving articles 2. structured form 3. keywords 4. which media websites.
• A statement of need: Does the paper have a section titled 'Statement of Need' that clearly states what problems the software is designed to solve and who the target audience is?
• State of the field: Do the authors describe how this software compares to other commonly-used packages?
  • See comment in previous section
• Quality of writing: Is the paper well written (i.e., it does not require editing for structure, language, or writing quality)?
• References: Is the list of references complete, and is everything cited appropriately that should be cited (e.g., papers, datasets, software)? Do references in the text use the proper citation syntax?

[whedon]

Hello human, I'm @whedon, a robot that can help you with some common editorial tasks. @Sara-ShiHo, @pmyteh it looks like you're currently assigned to review this paper 🎉.

⚠️ JOSS reduced service mode ⚠️

Due to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, JOSS is currently operating in a "reduced service mode". You can read more about what that means in our blog post.

⭐ Important ⭐

If you haven't already, you should seriously consider unsubscribing from GitHub notifications for this (https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews) repository. As a reviewer, you're probably currently watching this repository which means for GitHub's default behaviour you will receive notifications (emails) for all reviews 😿

To fix this do the following two things:

1. Set yourself as 'Not watching' https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews:

2. You may also like to change your default settings for this watching repositories in your GitHub profile here: https://github.com/settings/notifications

For a list of things I can do to help you, just type:

@whedon commands

For example, to regenerate the paper pdf after making changes in the paper's md or bib files, type:

@whedon generate pdf

[whedon]

Software report (experimental):

github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.88  T=0.04 s (910.5 files/s, 53030.6 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Python                          18            242            194            911
YAML                             4              7             12             92
Markdown                         3             55              0             85
reStructuredText                 4             45             77             53
TOML                             1              5              0             52
TeX                              1              2              0             35
DOS Batch                        1              8              1             26
make                             1              4              7              9
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                            33            368            291           1263
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Statistical information for the repository '20911ab5d5684f4c1f1be61c' was
gathered on 2021/07/16.
The following historical commit information, by author, was found:

Author                     Commits    Insertions      Deletions    % of changes
Eetu Mäkelä                     44          2724           2444           77.33
Pihla Toivanen                  38          1291            224           22.67

Below are the number of rows from each author that have survived and are still
intact in the current revision:

Author                     Rows      Stability          Age       % in comments
Eetu Mäkelä                1289           47.3          0.7                7.60
Pihla Toivanen               58            4.5          2.0                6.90

[whedon]

Reference check summary (note 'MISSING' DOIs are suggestions that need verification):

OK DOIs

- 10.1177/1464884920985724 is OK
- 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01596.x is OK

MISSING DOIs

- None

INVALID DOIs

- None

[whedon]

👉📄 Download article proof 📄 View article proof on GitHub 📄 👈

[whedon]

👋 @Sara-ShiHo, please update us on how your review is going (this is an automated reminder).

[whedon]

👋 @pmyteh, please update us on how your review is going (this is an automated reminder).

[Sara-ShiHo]

So far, I have a few questions/suggestions for the authors:

• I believe .DS_Store should be removed from the repo and be added to .gitignore
• I have not found any 'performance claims'. I understand that speed might vary due to internet performance, but it might be useful to give a rough idea of how long web scraping takes using this tool. For example, how long will the queries in the example 'Members of parliament' take? Are the run times for the different sources approximately the same?
• Are there any automated tests?
• I did not find any 'Community guidelines' regarding third party contributions. I believe that should be added somewhere in order to pass the review.
• I believe the 'Statement of Need' section in the paper was sufficient. But I was curious whether there are comparable packages for media research which should be mentioned?

[jiemakel]

In commit hsci-r/finnish-media-scrapers@901bbf5, I've tried to answer the questions/suggestions given by @Sara-ShiHo .

More specifically beyond what is now added to the README:

• on performance, as opposed to trying to be efficient, the scrapers actually by default sleep for one second (a hugely conservative setting) between each request to the media servers in order to be good netizens and not overload their servers. At the same time, the code has actually been refactored to use async io in Support for Python async(io) functions hsci-r/finnish-media-scrapers#7, which, if wanted, would allow a programmatic user to launch as many simultaneous requests as they dare.
• on automated tests, there are none. I would like for there to be some, but found them problematic to include and to possibly give a false sense of security. In truth, the internal functioning of the library is quite simple. The complexity goes into interacting with the various media APIs as well as correctly extracting the texts from their varying article layouts. Here, we're anyway at the mercy of the outlets changing their APIs and layouts. Understanding this, my strategy has been to program defensively and to make the crawlers complain loudly through logging whenever they're encountering something unexpected. At the same time, I would have liked to include a set of tests ensuring that current article layouts continue to be properly extracted whenever adding something new. However, that would have required including HTML examples of such articles as part of the repo, and that could have brought IPR concerns, particularly as one of the outlets requires an active subscription to read the articles. So, in the end, I decided the defensive coding fallback should be enough, wherein I can manually rerun the crawler after changes, and it will complain in quite a specific, traceable and debuggable manner if I've broken anything.

[ajstewartlang]

Hi @Sara-ShiHo and @pmyteh just wondering how your reviews are going?

[Sara-ShiHo]

I just looked through jiemakel's most recent commit & updated my reviewer checklist. I'm going through the functionality right now; I might have some more suggestions/questions.

[Sara-ShiHo]

First off, thank you @jiemakel for your detailed revision. I have a few more suggestions.

• I was hoping that the "Related Work" section would be added to the paper since technically it's in the "Software paper" part of the review checklist (I don't have an opinion on whether it needs to be in the README).
• For the Helsingin Sanomat documenation, add more explicit instructions for username (or email?) and password such as: "Sign up at https://www.hs.fi/".
• Have a folder with sample output from one of the media. I think users might like to see that and determine whether it fits their needs before installing.
• I guess the /members_of_parliament folder contains some of the code used for a paper, which makes sense. However, as a standalone example for this repo, I think it takes too long to run. It would be more useful if the example were quicker so that the user could see the output more immediately. Maybe shortening the date range or only querying members of one party will be sufficient to cut down the time.

Finally, I think the paper is well-written and doesn't need change, but I thought the README documentation for HS could be reorganized like this (although feel free to do differently if you disagree).

This scraper requires a log-in email and password for Helsingin Sanomat. Sign up at https://www.hs.fi/ and add them to the command fms-fetch-hs. For example fms-fetch-hs -i hs-sdp.csv -o hs-sdp -u <email> -p <password>.

Technically, the fms-fetch-hs command uses pyppeteer to control a headless Chromium browser to log in and ensure the dynamically rendered content in HS articles is captured. To ensure a compatible Chromium, when first running the tool, pyppeteer will download an isolated version of Chromium for itself, causing some ~150MB of network traffic and disk space usage.

After fetching the articles, extract texts with fms-html-to-text e.g. fms-html-to-text-hs -o hs-sdp-output hs-sdp.

[UMTti]

I've done the following additions to the repository as @Sara-ShiHo suggested:

• Related work section has been added to the paper in this commit
• In the commit, instructions for signing up to HS has been added
• Example output files have been added as HTML and text files in this commit
• Members of parliament -example has been changed to download articles only about Petteri Orpo, chairperson of National Coalition Party. Also, the timeframe has been limited. The possibility to download articles about all members of parliament is still existing. (commit in the example folder and commit in README.md)

[ajstewartlang]

Hi @Sara-ShiHo and @pmyteh - I'm just checking in to see how your reviews are progressing - could you provide an update please?

[Sara-ShiHo]

The last round of changes look good to me. I'll have time tomorrow to do a final review.

[Sara-ShiHo]

@ajstewartlang I have checked off the last few things on my list. Everything looks good to me. Thank you.

[ajstewartlang]

Thanks @Sara-ShiHo. @pmyteh can I check you're getting on ok with your review?

[ajstewartlang]

@jiemakel many apologies for the delay in progressing your submission - I've been trying to line up another reviewer so that we have two completed reviews in place. I've just sent another invite out this morning...

[ajstewartlang]

@whedon add @GaurangTandon as reviewer

[whedon]

OK, @pmyteh is no longer a reviewer

[ajstewartlang]

@whedon generate pdf

[whedon]

👉📄 Download article proof 📄 View article proof on GitHub 📄 👈

[ajstewartlang]

Many thanks for your helpful and detailed reviews, @Sara-ShiHo and @GaurangTandon - and for a great submission @UMTti

If you could now do the following please, that would be great:

• Make a tagged release of the software.
• Archive the reviewed software in Zenodo or a similar service (e.g., figshare, an institutional repository)
• Check the archival deposit (e.g., in Zenodo) has the correct metadata. This includes the title (should match the paper title) and author list (make sure the list is correct and people who only made a small fix are not on it). You may also add the authors' ORCID.
• Please list the DOI of the archived version here.

[jiemakel]

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5796453

[ajstewartlang]

@whedon set 10.5281/zenodo.5796453 as archive

[whedon]

OK. 10.5281/zenodo.5796453 is the archive.

[ajstewartlang]

@whedon set v1.1.1 as version

[whedon]

OK. v1.1.1 is the version.

[ajstewartlang]

@whedon recommend-accept

[whedon]

Attempting dry run of processing paper acceptance...

[whedon]

Reference check summary (note 'MISSING' DOIs are suggestions that need verification):

OK DOIs

- 10.1177/1464884920985724 is OK
- 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01596.x is OK

MISSING DOIs

- None

INVALID DOIs

- None

[whedon]

👋 @openjournals/joss-eics, this paper is ready to be accepted and published.

Check final proof 👉 openjournals/joss-papers#2843

If the paper PDF and Crossref deposit XML look good in openjournals/joss-papers#2843, then you can now move forward with accepting the submission by compiling again with the flag deposit=true e.g.

@whedon accept deposit=true

[arfon]

@whedon accept deposit=true

[whedon]

Doing it live! Attempting automated processing of paper acceptance...

[whedon]

🐦🐦🐦 👉 Tweet for this paper 👈 🐦🐦🐦

[whedon]

🚨🚨🚨 THIS IS NOT A DRILL, YOU HAVE JUST ACCEPTED A PAPER INTO JOSS! 🚨🚨🚨

Here's what you must now do:

0. Check final PDF and Crossref metadata that was deposited 👉 Creating pull request for 10.21105.joss.03504 joss-papers#2844
1. Wait a couple of minutes, then verify that the paper DOI resolves https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.03504
2. If everything looks good, then close this review issue.
3. Party like you just published a paper! 🎉🌈🦄💃👻🤘

Any issues? Notify your editorial technical team...

[arfon]

@Sara-ShiHo, @GaurangTandon – many thanks for your reviews here and to @ajstewartlang for editing this submission! JOSS relies upon the volunteer effort of people like you and we simply wouldn't be able to do this without you ✨

@jiemakel – your paper is now accepted and published in JOSS ⚡🚀💥

[whedon]

🎉🎉🎉 Congratulations on your paper acceptance! 🎉🎉🎉

If you would like to include a link to your paper from your README use the following code snippets:

Markdown:
[![DOI](https://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.03504/status.svg)](https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.03504)

HTML:
<a style="border-width:0" href="https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.03504">
  <img src="https://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.03504/status.svg" alt="DOI badge" >
</a>

reStructuredText:
.. image:: https://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.03504/status.svg
   :target: https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.03504

This is how it will look in your documentation:

We need your help!

Journal of Open Source Software is a community-run journal and relies upon volunteer effort. If you'd like to support us please consider doing either one (or both) of the the following:

• Volunteering to review for us sometime in the future. You can add your name to the reviewer list here: https://joss.theoj.org/reviewer-signup.html
• Making a small donation to support our running costs here: https://numfocus.org/donate-to-joss

[UMTti]

Thanks to all the reviewers and editors for your helpful comments in improving this project!