Ed Summers is always up to interesting things. Recently, he cooked up something called étudier

 […] a small Python program that uses Selenium and requests-html to drive a non-headless browser to collect a citation graph around a particular Google Scholar citation or set of search results. The resulting network is written out as a Gephi file and a D3 visualization using networkx.

I had a few issues getting it to upgrade properly (I was there for version 0.0.1!) because I’m frankly a bit messy when it comes to installing and upgrading python things. This led to a lot of frustration, as these things often do, and reminded me forcefully of the advice to be using virtualenv to wall off these different experiments! Below are my notes for getting things running tickety-boo.

pip3 install --upgrade virtualenv

virtualenv edsu-etudier

source edsu-etudier/bin/activate

pip3 install etudier

I already had chromedriver installed using brew install chromedriver so I was ahead of the game there.

Now, let’s find the citation graph for something fun like Hamilakis’ Archaeology and the senses. 

etudier.py 'https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4956378495941026486&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en

ta da! So below, just a quick ‘n’ nasty viz…

feature image ‘Reading Glasses’ Mari Helin-Tuominen, Unsplash