Web Scraping with Andrew Collier: Session 1

Andrew Collier (Exegetic Analytics, @datawookie) is back to give us a four-week Web Scraping in R course! The term ‘Web Scraping’ refers to the automated gathering of information from websites hosted on the internet. It is a form of copying, in which specific data is gathered and copied from the web, typically into a central local database or spreadsheet, for later retrieval or analysis. Andrew has recently used web scraping to create the Trundler API and R package: a repository of historical pricing data of goods sold by major local retailers (https://www.trundler.dev/). The possibilities presented by this technology are endless, and we are super excited for this opportunity to learn more!

Outline

Session 1 (7 October):
• Introduction to Web Scraping
• Scraping with Screenshots
• Working with URLs

Session 2 (14 October): Locating content with CSS and XPath
Session 3 (21 October): Scraping static sites with {rvest}
Session 4 (28 October): Scraping dynamic sites with Selenium

These sessions will take place via Google Meet at 17:30 sharp and last a maximum of 90 mins. We hope to see you there!

To join: Use the Google Meet link provided - please mute your microphone when joining!