Workshop: An Introduction to Webscraping Using R
Instructor: (opens in a new window)Sarah King (University College Dublin)
Thursday, 30 November, 15:00-16:30 (Irish time)
You can register for the event (opens in a new window)here.
Details: For many applied research questions, researchers need to harvest data from web pages. Web scraping is a technique for efficiently collecting and organizing information from websites. Although these data can be collected manually, automation saves time and is less error-prone. In this workshop, participants will use the statistical programming language R to automate the web scraping process. Participants will learn about the general structure of a typical web page and how to use the rvest package to select elements, such as text fields and tables, and iteratively extract relevant data.
Basic knowledge of R is required.
About the speaker: Sarah King is a PhD candidate and Iseult Honohan Doctoral Scholar in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University College Dublin as well as a member of the Connected_Politics Lab. She received her M.A. in Political Science from the University of Southern Mississippi. Her PhD research focuses on public policy, comparative higher education policy, computational methods, and quantitative text analysis methods.