This two-day workshop in scraping is designed for reporters with no knowledge of scraping or programming and provides essential skills for getting original stories by compiling data across a range of online sources. By the end of the workshop, you will be able to use specialist scraping tools (without programming) and begin to write your own, more advanced, scrapers. You will also be able to communicate with programmers on relevant projects.Scraping is the process of automatically collating information from the web. It might be grabbing entries across hundreds of webpages, fetching and combining dozens of spreadsheets, or thousands of PDFs.The results have led to exclusive stories for organisations ranging from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Trinity Mirror, to DC Thomson, Channel 4 and the BBC.
Technical Requirements
Delegates will be using their own laptop and should have a Google drive account, and have downloaded the free version of outwit hub ahead of the course. A GitHub account would also be useful.The software is all free. However the free version of OutWit Hub only allows you to scrape 100 rows, so you may want to pay for the full version but can decide after you’ve learnt how to use it on the course.
Date, timetable and fees are available here.
Tags: Journalism education Data journalism