Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

I assume you are starting with DKIM-complete-podesta-1-18.txt.gz.

If you are starting with another source, you will need different instructions. 😉

First, remember from Clinton/Podesta Emails – Towards A More Complete Graph (Part 1) that I wanted to delete all the < and > signs from the text.

That’s easy enough (uncompress the text first):

sed 's/<//g' DKIM-complete-podesta-1-18.txt > DKIM-complete-podesta-1-18-01.txt

followed by:

sed 's/>//g' DKIM-complete-podesta-1-18-01.txt > DKIM-complete-podesta-1-18-02.txt

Here’s where we started:

001 00032251.eml|False|2010-10-06 18:29:52-04:00|Joshua Dorner <jdorner@americanprogress.org>|”‘bigcampaign@googlegroups.com'” <bigcampaign@googlegroups.com>|[big campaign] Follow-up Materials from Background Briefing on the Chamber’s Foreign Funding, fyi|<A28459BA2B4D5D49BED0238513058A7F012ADC1EF58F @CAPMAILBOX.americanprogresscenter.org>
002 00032146.eml|True|2015-04-14 18:19:46-04:00|Josh Schwerin <jschwerin@hillaryclinton.com>|hrcrapid <HRCrapid@googlegroups.com>|=?UTF-8?Q?NYT=3A_Hillary_Clinton=E2=80=99s_Chipotle_Order=3A_Above_Avera?= =?UTF-8?Q?ge?=|<CAPrY+5KJ=NG+Vs-khDVpe-L=bP5=qvPcZTS5FDam5LixueQsKA@mail.gmail.com>

Here’s the result after the first two sed scripts:

001 00032251.eml|False|2010-10-06 18:29:52-04:00|Joshua Dorner jdorner@americanprogress.org|”‘bigcampaign@googlegroups.com'” bigcampaign@googlegroups.com|[big campaign] Follow-up Materials from Background Briefing on the Chamber’s Foreign Funding, fyi|
A28459BA2B4D5D49BED0238513058A7F012ADC1EF58F
@CAPMAILBOX.americanprogresscenter.org
002 00032146.eml|True|2015-04-14 18:19:46-04:00|Josh Schwerin jschwerin@hillaryclinton.com|hrcrapid HRCrapid@googlegroups.com|=?UTF-8?Q?NYT=3A_Hillary_Clinton=E2=80=99s_Chipotle_Order=3A_Above_Avera?= =?UTF-8?Q?ge?=|CAPrY+5KJ=NG+Vs-khDVpe-L=bP5=qvPcZTS5FDam5LixueQsKA@mail.gmail.com

BTW, I increment the numbers of my result files, DKIM-complete-podesta-1-18-01.txt, DKIM-complete-podesta-1-18-02.txt, because when I don’t, I run different sed commands on the same original file, expecting a cumulative result.

That’s spelled – disappointment and wasted effort looking for problems that aren’t problems. Number your result files.

The nodes and edges mentioned in Clinton/Podesta Emails – Towards A More Complete Graph (Part 1):

Nodes

• Emails, message-id is ID and subject is label, make Wikileaks id into link
• From/To, email addresses are ID and name is label
• True/False, true/false as ID, True/False as labels
• Date, truncated to 2015-07-24 (example), date as id and label

Edges

• To/From – Edges with message-id (source) email-address (target) to/from (label)
• Verify – Edges with message-id (source) true/false (target) verify (label)
• Date – Edges with message-id (source) – date (target) date (label)

Am I missing anything? The longer I look at problems like this the more likely my thinking/modeling will change.

What follows is very crude, command line creation of the node and edge files. Something more elaborate could be scripted/written in any number of languages.

Our fields (numbered for reference) are:

ID – 1| Verified – 2| Date – 3| From – 4| To – 5| Subject -6| Message-Id – 7

You don’t have to take my word for it, try this:

awk 'FS="|" { print $7}' DKIM-complete-podesta-1-18-02.txt

The output prints to the console. Those all look like message-ids to me, well, with the exception of the one that reads ” 24 September.”

How much dirty data do you think is in the message-id field?

A crude starting assumption is that any message-id field without the “@” character is dirty.

Let’s try:

awk ‘FS = “|” { print $7} DKIM-complete-podesta-1-18-02.txt | grep -v @ | wc -l

Which means we are going to extract the 7th field, search (grep) over those results for the “@” sign, where the -v switch means only print lines that DO NOT match, and we will count those lines with wc -l.

Ready? Press return.

I get 594 “dirty” message-ids.

Here is a sampling:

…
Rolling Stone
TheHill
MSNBC, Jeff Weaver interview on Sanders health care plan and his Wall St. ad
Texas Tribune
20160120 Burlington, IA Organizing Event
start spreadin’ the news…..
Building Trades Union (Keystone XL)
Rubio Hits HRC On Cuba, Russia
2.19.2016
Sourcing Story
Drivers Licenses
Day 1
H1N1 Flu Shot Available
…

Those look an awful lot like subject lines to me. You?

I suspect those subject lines had the separator character “|” in those lines, before we extracted the data from the .eml files.

I’ve tried to repair the existing files but the cleaner solution is to return to the extraction script and the original email files.

More on that tomorrow!

Gephi is a great tool, but it’s only as good as its input.

The Gephi 8.2 email importer (missing in Gephi 9.*) is lossy, informationally speaking, as I have mentioned before.

Here’s a sample from the verification results on podesta-release-1-18:

9981 00045326.eml|False|2015-07-24 12:58:16-04:00|Oren Shur |John Podesta , Robby Mook , Joel Benenson , “Margolis, Jim” , Mandy Grunwald , David Binder , Teddy Goff , Jennifer Palmieri , Kristina Schake , Christina Reynolds , Katie Connolly , “Kaye, Anson” , Peter Brodnitz , “Rimel, John” , David Dixon , Rich Davis , Marlon Marshall , Michael Halle , Matt Paul , Elan Kriegel , Jake Sullivan |FW: July IA Poll Results|<168005c7ccb3cbcc0beb3ffaa08a8767@mail.gmail.com>

The Gephi 8.2 mail importer fails to create a node representing an email message.

I propose we cure that failure by taking the last field, here:

168005c7ccb3cbcc0beb3ffaa08a8767@mail.gmail.com

and the next to last field:

FW: July IA Poll Results

and putting them as id and label, respectively in a node list:

168005c7ccb3cbcc0beb3ffaa08a8767@mail.gmail.com; “FW: July IA Poll Results”;

As part of the transformation, we need to remove the < and > signs around the message ID, then add a ; to mark the end of the ID field and put double quote ” “ around the subject to use it as a label. Then close the second field with another ;.

While we are talking about nodes, all the email addresses change from:

Oren Shur

to:

oshur@hillaryclinton.com; “Oren Shur”;

which are ID and label of the node list, respectively.

I could remove the < and > characters as part of the extraction script but will use sed at the command line instead.

Reminder: Always work on a copy of your data, never the original.

Then we need to create an edge list, one that represents the relationships between the email (as node) to the sender and receivers of the email (also nodes). For this first iteration, I’m going to use labels on the edges to distinguish between senders and receivers.

Assuming my first row of the edges file reads:

Source; Target; Role (I did not use “Type” because I suspect that is a controlled term for Gephi.)

Then the first few edges would read:

168005c7ccb3cbcc0beb3ffaa08a8767@mail.gmail.com; oshur@hillaryclinton.com>; from;
168005c7ccb3cbcc0beb3ffaa08a8767@mail.gmail.com; john.podesta@gmail.com>; to;
168005c7ccb3cbcc0beb3ffaa08a8767@mail.gmail.com; re47@hillaryclinton.com; to;
168005c7ccb3cbcc0beb3ffaa08a8767@mail.gmail.com; jbenenson@bsgco.com; to;
168005c7ccb3cbcc0beb3ffaa08a8767@mail.gmail.com; Jim.Margolis@gmmb.com; to;
….

As you can see, this is going to be a “busy” graph! 😉

Filtering is going to play an important role in exploring this graph, so let’s add nodes that will help with that process.

I propose we add to the node list:

true; True
false; False

as id and labels.

Which means for the edge list we can have:

168005c7ccb3cbcc0beb3ffaa08a8767@mail.gmail.com; true; verify;

Do you have an opinion on the order, source/target for true/false?

Thinking this will enable us to filter nodes that have not been verified or to include only those that have failed verification.

For experimental purposes, I think we need to rework the date field:

2015-07-24 12:58:16-04:00

I would truncate that to:

2015-07-24

and add such truncated dates to the node list:

2015-07-24; 2015-07-24;

as ID and label, respectively.

Then for the edge list:

168005c7ccb3cbcc0beb3ffaa08a8767@mail.gmail.com; 2015-07-24; date;

Reasoning that we can filter to include/exclude nodes based on dates, which if you add enough email boxes, could help visualize the reaction to and propagation of emails.

Even assuming named participants in these emails have “deleted” their inboxes, there are always automatic backups. It’s just a question of persistence before the rest of this network can be fleshed out.

Oh, one last thing. You have probably notice the Wikileaks “ID” that forms part of the filename?

9981 00045326.eml

The first part forms the end of a URL to link to the original post at Wikileaks.

Thus, in this example, 9981 becomes:

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/9981

The general form being:

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/(Wikileaks-ID)

For the convenience of readers/users, I want to modify my earlier proposal for the email node list entry from:

168005c7ccb3cbcc0beb3ffaa08a8767@mail.gmail.com; “FW: July IA Poll Results”;

to:

168005c7ccb3cbcc0beb3ffaa08a8767@mail.gmail.com; “FW: July IA Poll Results”; https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/9981;

Where the third field is “link.”

I am eliding over lots of relationships and subjects but I’m not reluctant to throw it all away and start over.

Your investment in a model isn’t lost by tossing the model, you learn something with every model you build.

Scripting underway, a post on that experience and the node/edge lists to follow later today.

The Bill Clinton, Inc. story reminds me of:

Although I steadfastly resist imaging either Bill or Hillary in that video. Just won’t go there!

Where a graph display can make a difference is that instead of just the one email/memo from Bill’s pimp, we can rapidly survey all of the emails in which he appears, in any role.

I ran that on Gephi 8.2 against podesta-release-1-18 but the results were:

Nodes 0, Edges 0.

Hmmm, there is something missing, possibly the CSV file?

I checked and podesta-release-1-18 has 393 emails where doug@presidentclinton.com appears.

Could try to find the “right” way to filter on email addresses but for now, let’s take a dirty short-cut.

I created a directory to hold all emails with doug@presidentclinton.com and ran into all manner of difficulties because the file names are plagued with spaces!

So much so that I unintentionally (read “by mistake”) saved all the doug@presidentclinton.com posts from podesta-release-1-18 to a different folder than the ones from podesta-release-19.

🙁

Well, but there is a happy outcome and an illustration of yet another Gephi capability.

I build the first graph from the doug@presidentclinton.com posts from podesta-release-1-18 and then with that graph open, imported the doug@presidentclinton.com from podesta-release-19 and appended those results to the open graph.

How cool is that!

Imagine doing that across data sets, assuming you paid close attention to identifiers, etc.

Sorry, back to the graphs, here is the random layout once the graphs were combined:

Applying the Yifan Hu network layout:

I ran network statistics on network diameter and applied colors based on betweenness:

And finally, adjusted the font and turned on the labels:

I have spent a fair amount of time just moving stuff about but imagine if you could interactively explore the emails, creating and trashing networks based on to:, from:, cc:, dates, content, etc.

The limits of Gephi imports were a major source of pain today.

I’m dodging those tomorrow in favor of creating node and adjacency tables with scripts.

PS: Don’t John Podesta and Doug Band look like two pimps in a pod? 😉

PPS: If you haven’t read the pimping Bill Clinton memo. (I think it has some other official title.)