SIGNS

🔬 meme study platform 🧮 computational memology ❤️ digital semiotics 📸

Platform for collecting and managing visual (image-based) text content — everything that is related to language-alike symbolic communication in a society. Conceptually, it is a tool for building a corpus of microtexts.

The term corpus means that we deal with a unit (object) in its context (surroundings) via encoding all the information by means of annotation (formalized description stored separately).

The tool can be of use for research in such disciplines as linguistics, history, cultural anthropology, social studies, semiotics etc.

Status

Beta / Work In Progress [March 2023]

The code base is still in experimental phase and it is being redesigned during development and testing. However, the platform is used for ongoing processing of real-world data for research purposes. Actually, the research drives the development of the platform.

Project structure

Telegram can be used as a tool for crowd-sourcing data (and adding minimal meta-information) that later are annotated via user interface of the platform.

Since January 2023 regular UI for direct uploading of images is available. That makes Telegram an optional data source.

Components

• server (provides API to access data, serves assets), written in JavaScript (NodeJS)
• client (functions as user interface to all the data), written in JavaScript (Vue 3)
• parser (extracts data from a Telegram chat), written in Python 3

Current development goals

• make interface more universal than dataset-specific
• test installing procedure (currently, it could be done only with manual intervention), make it completely automatized
• implement user authentication and related functions
• remove Python code replacing it with JavaScript
• implement connectors for other data sources (Google Drive?)

Requirements	OS	NodeJS	PostgreSQL	Python
Minimal setup	any	14	10	3.6
Development setup (recommended)	Linux	18	15	3.10

Deployment

The example setup script is in deploy.sh. However, as for now, it allows only update installed instance. For setting up, one has to make following steps:

1. create PostgreSQL user and database
2. provide environmental variables (via .env file): create signs.env in your working directory (see an example below)
3. download the deployment script (deploy.sh) into your working directory and run it
4. go to signs directory and run Telegram importing script (telegram-import.py)

It is recommended to run the application behind a web proxy, such as Apache or Nginx. As well in production environment one should use rather a process manager, than a bare NodeJS instance. I recommend PM2, there is a config file for it. Also, one can pass the environmental variables in any other manner: via Docker config, via PM2 config, etc.

Interaction with Telegram

Getting API ID and API Hash

Environmental variables sample

# PostgreSQL user
PGUSER=database_user
# PostgreSQL host (IP or hostname)
PGHOST=127.0.0.1
# PostgreSQL password
PGPASSWORD=.................
# PostgreSQL database
PGDATABASE=database_signs
# PostgreSQL port
PGPORT=5432
# Application port
# If not set, default value is used (8080)
PORT=8080
# Telegram API ID 
API_ID=.....................
# Telegram API Hash
API_HASH=...................
# Telegram Group ID
GROUP_ID=...................

👾