Digestion of hockey transcripts - Python script to read in transcript of hockey game and identify player "mentions" in an announcer's call.

I performed this activity to test if a play-by-play announcer dictates the "flow" of play in a hockey game in a meaningful way. That is, would we be able to approximate the movement of the puck between players using an announcer's calls. No conclusions yet!

After some internet searching and twitter questioning, I couldn't find a resource for "archived" transcripts of hockey games. So, for initial testing - NHL Gamecenter, closed captioning, my ears, and really fast typing was utilized. After "completing" the transcript, I read through it to make sure all player references matched a unique identifier for that player (see below). It was by no means an exact science.

I tried to make the python readable enough so that a newbie to programming might be able to follow along.

• Roster File (csv): Roster of players in game. Must include a unique identifier (first column = "Identifier". This file could be pulled from a game summary on war-on-ice.com
• Transcript File (txt): Actual transcript of game. Any references to a player should match the "Identifier" in the roster file in order to be matched. Any stoppages in play -- or how you may otherwise want the play split up -- should be designated by two new lines.

• Mention Sequence (csv): Output of mention sequence in format of (MentionID, Portion, Player, Team)
• Mention Summary (csv): Summarized results in format of (Player, Team, Portion, MentionCount)