Net4MRLW

Introduction

Net 4 MRLW is a bundle of scripts written in Python. These are not of supremious intelligence nor unavoidable difficulties but make the everyday work of social scientists easier.

These scripts are developed as a module of the platform of sociological investigation Marlowe (which codename is MRLW). Mrlw is part of the Prospero Suite. The French acronym Prospero stands for Software for the Pragmatic, Experimental and Reflexive Sociology Program and takes advantage of the fact that the French word for Software and Scientific Program is the same (Programme).

Despite Net4MRLW is developed as a module of the MRLW investigator tool, no Prospero Software is concerned by this Sourceforge webpage. Nor Caliban, neither Marlowe are indeed free Software, they are not intended to be and won't be commented on this webpages. This Sourceforge space is dedicated to Net4MRLW, and more particularly on issue concerning

Net4MRLW is developed as a cross platform script. It is known to work under Linux and Windows.

Installation

Just download the Net4MRLW archive from the SourceForge releases page. Uncompress it in the folder of your choice. That's it!

How uncompress archive files

How to choose the location

Net4MRLW is a Python script

For most of the users, a working Python will be needed to interpreted the scripts. Anyway, for some privileged users, installing Python won't be necessary.

Command line uses

For a command line use, you absolutely need python installed on your computer.

Marlowe-companion uses

Those who aim to use this bundle of scripts with the Marlowe Software needn't the Python Language installed on their computer. Instead, they need (of course) a properly installed instance of Marlowe. Thank to its genius programmer, MRLW will interpret the python scripts by itself (!).

Access a search engine - PyGoogle

Just download the PyGoogle package from the Sourceforge server and uncompress it in the folder where you have extracted the Net4MRLW scripts.

To use this (core) feature, you'll also need a identification number to the Google API. You ll be provided with such a number on the Google API Webpage.

When you have this number, just write it down in a text file (named googlekey.txt) in the same location as your Net4MRLW scripts.

PDF Conversion - xpdf

For PDF access and conversion, Net4MRLW use the pdftotext utility included in the xpdf package. Make sure that pdf2text is in your Path.

How to use it

  1. Open a command line box
  2. Launch Python from the command line
    python
  3. The ">>>" Python prompt appears.
  4. Load the script
    from net4mrlw import *
  5. Choose one of the available commands to launch a query on the Internet. For instance, "cherche" will invoke PyGoogle.
  6. The result of Net4MRLW are saved in a txt-corpus on the hard drive.
  7. As any Python command line session, you can quit the shell with ctrl+d.

To-Dos

  1. Query through search engines ('cherche' command)
  2. Investigation on public persons
  3. Investigation on co-occurrence
  4. Definition of terms
  5. Comparison of definitions
  6. Syntactical/Pragmatical Pattern Matching
  7. Encyclopedic information

Screenshot

Here is an example of use of Net4MRLW as a command line:

Net4MRLW 
on Debian Gnome

Author

The Net4MRLW project is headed by Christophe Lejeune. Feel free to contact him for comments, questions or suggestions. Any contribution welcome...!

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