How to use rodham

What is this anyway?

rodham aims at easing access and analysis of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s personal emails which are deemed important to the author in light of recent events.

Get started

The function search_emails allows fetching the list of emails that were released. These are available either by calling the Wall Street Journal’s API or via the built-in dataset (recommended).

library(rodham)

# get list of emails
data("emails")

# equivalent to:
em <- search_emails()

identical(emails, em)

## [1] TRUE

Simple Network

Using the list of emails (data("emails")) we can plot the network of emails using edges_emails which returns a list of edges meant for a directed network.

edges <- edges_emails(emails)
knitr::kable(head(edges))

The freq corresponds to the occurences of edges (number of emails). The list of edges alone allows building a simple network.

g <- igraph::graph.data.frame(edges)
# plot network
plot(g, layout = igraph::layout.fruchterman.reingold(g),
     vertex.label.color = hsv(h = 0, s = 0, v = 0, alpha = 0.0), 
     vertex.size = log1p(igraph::degree(g)) * 2, edge.arrow.size = 0.1, 
     edge.arrow.width = 0.1, edge.width = log1p(igraph::E(g)$freq)/4,
     vertex.frame.color="#FFFFFF")

Get emails content

In the above we gather a reasonable amount of meta-data on the emails but we do not get the actual content of the emails. To do so we need to download the emails—as released—in PDF format and extract the text. First we are going to need xpdf to extract the content; you can either download it manually from the download setion or you can attempt using get_xpdf (only tested on windows). get_xpdf downloads then unzips the extractor then returns the full path to the pdftotext.exe file required for the next step.

xpdf <- get_xpdf(dest = "C:/") # get extractor
# or if you downloaded manually point to pdftotext
xpdf <- "your/path/xpdfbin-win-3.04/bin64/pdftotext.exe"

Once we have the extractor we can fetch some emails using get_emails, the function requires you to select a specific release, here are the valid ones:

• Benghazi
• June
• July
• August
• September
• October
• November
• January 7
• February 13
• January 19
• February 29
• December
• Non-disclosure

dir <- "./rodham" # this is where the emails will be saved
dir.create(dir) # directory must exist
emails_bengh <- get_emails(release = "Benghazi", save.dir = dir, extractor = xpdf)

The function downloads, unzips and extracts the content from all email; note that this may take some time. The files will be extracted in a folder named after the requested release and its full path returned.

files <- list.files(emails_bengh) # list extracted files
content <- lapply(1:length(files), function(x){
  readLines(paste0(emails_bengh, "/", files[[x]])) # read files
})