FIT1043 Assignment 3
Semester 2, 2019
Due: Sunday 27th October 2019, 11:55pm
Hand in Requirements:
1) Please hand in a PDF file containing your answers to all the questions and,
numbered correspondingly.
2) Your report should include the following cases:
● The screenshots/images of the outputs/graphs you generate in order to
justify your answers to all the questions.
● Copies of all the bash command lines and R scripts you use. If your answer
is wrong, you may still get half marks if your command line or script is close
to correct.
3) Please be informed that you need to explain what each part of command does
for all your answers. For instance, if the code you use is ‘unzip tutorial_data.zip‘,
you need to explain that the code is used to uncompress the zip file.
4) Please don’t include the questions into the assignment (It has 5% penalty).
Data:
The dataset for this assignment is in the Google shared drive:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/15icdh6UTmJ7OJ1ytMkgp0OT4G8ZnqSm/view?usp=sharing
The dataset contains Facebook posts from 15 of the top mainstream media sources
(e.g., ABC, BBC, etc.) from 2012 to 2016.
Note: This is a large file, so your best bet is to download them while in the lab/studio
and do the assignment there. You will need to use either a Linux machine for this or
a Mac terminal or Cygwin on a Windows machine.
Assignment Tasks:
There are two tasks that you need to complete for this assignment. Students that
complete only Tasks A1-A9 and B1 can only get a maximum of Distinction.
Students that attempt tasks A10 and B2 (Challenge Questions) will be showing
critical analysis skills and a deeper understanding of the task at hand and can achieve
the highest grade. You need to use the Unix shell and R to complete the tasks.
Task A: Investigating Facebook Data using shell commands
Download the file FB_Dataset.csv.zip from the link above. Use a Unix shell to
manipulate the file and answer the following questions.
1) Decompress the file. How big is it?
2) What delimiter is used to separate the columns in the file and how many
columns are there?
3) The 2nd column is the unique identifier for a Facebook post. Print out the name
of other columns in the output?
4) How many unique pages are there?
5) What is the date range for Facebook posts in this file? (Assume that the data is
in order)
6) When was the first mention in the file regarding “Italian Dishes” and what was
the post name?
7) How many times is “Donald Trump” mentioned in the file? How did you find
this? (Do not ignore the case, i.e., lower/upper case)
8) What about “Barack Obama”? Who is more popular on Facebook, Obama or
Trump? (Do not ignore the case)
9) Select the posts where “Trump” (Ignore the case) is mentioned in the post
content and number of likes for those posts are greater than 100. And generate
a new file with post_id and sorted like_count and name it “trump.txt”. (You need
to add a screenshot of the first 5 rows and the column headers in your report).
10) Challenge: Find the total number of love_count and angry_count for “Donald
Trump” and “Barack Obama” separately. Who has more positive feeling among
people? Justify your answer.
[Hint 1: you will need to search online to find how to sum a column of numbers
using awk.
Hint 2: You will need to consider both love and angry count when justifying your
answer.]
Task B: Graphing the Data in R
1) We want to consider how the amount of discussion regarding Donald Trump
varies over the time period covered by the data file. To answer this question,
you will need to extract the timestamps for all posts referring to Trump using
the shell. You will then need to read them into R and generate a histogram.
[Hint: To read the data into R, first generate a file containing only the timestamp
column as text. Then read the file into R as a CSV.] R will not recognise the
strings as timestamps automatically, so you’ll need to convert them from text
values using the strptime() function. Instructions on how to use the function is
available here:
https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/base/versions/3.6.1/topics/strptime
You will need to write a format string, starting with “%a %b” to tell the function
how to parse the particular date/time format in your file. What format string do
you need to use?
A. Once you have converted the timestamps, use the hist() function to plot
the data in R.
B. The plot has a bit of an unusual shape. Describe the pattern you see.
2) Challenge: In this question, we want to look at a specific content type that
influences engagement on Facebook. To make this task easier, we will
specifically look at the number of comments posted against each of the post
type (event, link, photo, status and video) for “fox-news”.
A. Draw a boxplot to show the distribution of comments made against
each type of post (event, link, photo, status and video) created by “foxnews”. What can you infer from this plot? Which is the most engaging
post type?
B. You may have noticed that the presence of outliers affects the
readability and interpretation of the data in the box plot. Redraw the
boxplot by filtering out values (comments_count) greater than 10,000.
C. Which type of post (event, link, photo, status or video) has on average
been most effective for “fox-news”. In other words, which post_type has
the highest median comment count.
Good Luck!