Harry Potter and the Rvest of Fanfiction

Kia ora koutou!

Keeping it super local this time, we are thrilled to announce that our next meetup will be workshop presented by Liza Bolton. If you are new to using R or web scraping, want some ideas for using the R package rvest, or are interested in analysing fan fiction, then get yourself along to this meetup. Arrive at 6pm for a 6:30pm start!

NOTE: The room is G13 not G14 (meetup won't allow adding G13 as a new location).

#Presenter
Liza Bolton is a PhD student in Statistics at the University of Auckland. Sometimes she is also an introductory stats lecturer and other times she is a Data Ambassador (www.dataembassy.co.nz), which is really just a more fun way of saying "statistical consultant". While having 2000 students do Harry Potter Fanfiction exam questions may be Liza's greatest life achievement, her second is, possibly, designing stats t-shirts that people have actually purchased. Make her day by following her on Twitter at @Liza_Bolton.

#Abstract
This workshop will introduce web scraping in R through the rvest package, as well as some basics of ethics/things to check before scraping, and basic ideas regarding URLs, HTML and CSS. The example will be based on scraping Harry Potter fanfiction because that was how this all started for Liza - needing a dataset to write a statistics exam for her students. Bringing along a computer with R installed is recommended, though you are still totally welcome to come without one.