Script for Counting Ads

Some of you expressed an interest in being able to quickly count all the ads in a folder and determine how many were published in a given year, decade, or month (to detect seasonal patterns across the year).

Here is a script that can do that. It is designed to work on Mac or Linux systems.

To use it, you should first download our adparsers repo by clicking on the "Download Zip" button on this page:

Download the adparsers repo as a zip

Unzip the downloaded file, and you should then have a directory that contains (among other things) the countads.sh script.

You should now copy the file to the directory that contains the ads you want to count. You can do this the drag-and-drop way, or you can use your terminal and the cp command. (If you forgot what that command does, revisit the Command Line bootcamp that was part of the MALLET homework. Once the script is in the directory, navigate to that directory in your terminal, and then run the command like this:

 ./countads.sh

If you get an error message, you may need to follow the instructions in the comments at the start of the script (which you can read on GitHub) to change the permissions. But if all goes well, you’ll see a printed breakdown of chronological counts. For example, when I run the script in the directory containing all our Mississippi ads, the script returns this:

TOTAL   1632 
     
DEC     ADS
1830s   1118
1840s   178
1850s   133
1860s   4
     
YEAR    ADS
1830    30
1831    54
1832    87
1833    68
1834    143
1835    157
1836    262
1837    226
1838    63
1839    28
1840    16
1841    16
1842    22
1843    33
1844    44
1845    25
1846    14
1847    1
1848    5
1849    2
1850    11
1851    17
1852    19
1853    15
1854    7
1855    9
1856    11
1857    23
1858    13
1859    8
1860    4
     
MONTH   ADS
1   100
2   89
3   103
4   130
5   160
6   161
7   188
8   150
9   150
10  149
11  146
12  86

If you choose, you can also "redirect" this output to a file, like this:

./countads.sh > filename.txt

Now you should be able to open filename.txt (which you can name whatever you want) in Microsoft Excel, and you’ll have a spreadsheet with all the numbers.

The script may seem to have limited value, but the key to its utility lies in first getting an interesting set of ads into a directory. That extends its usefulness. For example, if you wanted only to know the month distribution of ads in a particular year, you could first move all the ads from that year into a directory, and run the script from within it. You’d get lots of zeroes for all the years that you’re not interested in, but you would get the month breakdown that you are interested in. Depending on which ads you put in the directory that you are counting in, you can get a lot of useful data that can then be graphed or added into further calculations.