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As part of my Master's thesis, I'm trying to run some statistics on which factors affect whether crowdfunding campaigns get funded or not. I've been trying to get data from the largest platform Kickstarter.com. Unfortunately, they have removed all the non-successful campaigns from their website (unless you have the direct link).

Luckily, I'm not the only one looking for this data. Webrobots.io have a scraper robot which crawls all Kickstarter projects and collects data in JSON format (http://webrobots.io/kickstarter-datasets/).

The latest dataset can be found on: http://webrobots.io/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Kickstarter_2015-10-22.json_.zip

However, my programming skills are limited, and I don't know how to convert it into an excel file where I can manipulate the data and run my analysis. I found a few online converters, but the file is far too big for it (approx 300 mb). Can someone please help me get the file converted?

It will earn you an acknowledgement in my Master's thesis when it gets published :)

Thanks in advance!!!

Nicolai
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  • It wouldn't be that difficult to cut the file into a number of smaller ones - the structure is pretty regular and you could do it "by hand" without too much effort. Then feed each of the resulting files into one of the online converters. – Tim Williams Nov 30 '15 at 04:15

2 Answers2

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I guess the answer for this varies massively on a few things.

  1. What subject is the masters covering? (mainly to appease many people who will probably assume you're hoping for people to do your homework for you! This might explain why the thread has been down-voted already)
  2. You mention your programming skills are limited... What programming skills do you have? What language would you be using to achieve this goal? Bear in mind that even with a fully coded solution, if it's not in the language you know, you might not be able to compile it!
  3. What kind of information do you want from the JSON file?

With regards to question 3, I've looked in the JSON file and it contains hierarchical data which is pretty difficult to replicate in a flat file i.e. an Excel or CSV file (I should know, we had to do this a lot in a previous job of mine).

But, I would look at the following plan of action to achieve what you're after:

  1. Use a JSON parser to serialize the data into a class structure (Visual Studio can create the classes for you... See this S/O thread - How to show the "paste Json class" in visual studio 2012 when clicking on Paste Special?)
  2. Once you've got the objects in memory, you can then step through them one by one and pick out the data you want and append them to a comma-separated string (in C# I'd use the StringBuilder) and write the rows of data out to a file on disk.

Once this is complete, you'll have the data you want. Depending on what data you want from the JSON file, step 2 could be the most difficult part as you'd need to step into the different levels of the data hierarchy.

Hope this points you in the right direction?

Community
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jonifen
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You may want to look at this Blog.

http://jdunkerley.co.uk/2015/09/04/downloading-and-parsing-met-office-historic-station-data-with-alteryx/

He uses a process with Alteryx that may line up with what you are trying to do. I am looking to do something similar, but haven't tried it yet. I'll update this answer if I get it to work.

Watki02
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