Understanding the Results

The resulting file structure

The examples below follow standard settings

If you choose other settings for when you run the program, your output directory may look different from the information on this page.

Reports

Reports are automatically generated with a unique hash as the overarching folder structure. Inside the reports directory, you’ll find a JSON file for each alto2txt directory (organised by NLP identifier).

The report structure, thus, looks like this:

The JSON file has some good troubleshooting information. You’ll find that the contents are structured as a Python dictionary (or JavaScript Object). Here is an example:

Here is an explanation of each of the keys in the dictionary:

Key	Explanation	Data type
path	The input path for the zip file that is being converted.	string
bytes	The size of the input zip file represented in bytes.	integer
size	The size of the input zip file represented in a human-readable string.	string
contents	#TODO #3	integer
start	Date and time when processing started (see also end below).	datestring
newspaper_paths	#TODO #3	list (string)
publication_codes	A list of the NLPs that are contained in the input zip file.	list (string)
issue_paths	A list of all the issue paths that are contained in the cache directory.	list (string)
item_paths	A list of all the item paths that are contained in the cache directory.	list (string)
end	Date and time when processing ended (see also start above).	datestring
seconds	Seconds that the script spent interpreting the zip file (should be added to the microseconds below).	integer
microseconds	Microseconds that the script spent interpreting the zip file (should be added to the seconds above).	integer

Fixtures

The most important output of the script is contained in the fixtures directory. This directory contains JSON files for all the different columns in the corresponding Django metadata database (i.e. DataProvider, Digitisation, Ingest, Issue, Newspaper, and Item). The numbering at the end of each file indicates the order of the files as they are divided into a maximum of 2e6 elements*:

Each JSON file contains a Python-like list (JavaScript Array) of dictionaries (JavaScript Objects), which have a primary key (pk), the related database model (in the example below the Django newspapers app’s newspaper table), and a nested dictionary/Object which contains all the values for the database’s table entry:

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* The maximum elements per file can be adjusted in the settings.py file’s settings object’s MAX_ELEMENTS_PER_FILE value.