Workshop “Web Scraping – how to collect data from the Web”

Description

Kyiv School of Economics is pleased to invite you to the one-day seminar on web scraping.

The seminar is designed for students without an IT background who are interested in economic research and are willing to use big datasets. During the seminar, the participants will learn how to scrap – gather automatically – data from the Web.

Collecting large dataset has never been so easy as many people nowadays put all kinds of information publicly available on the internet. Automatically gathering aka ‘scraping’ such information from the Web is in fact much easier than many people think. The goal of this workshop is for participants to get to know some examples of what can be done and what has been done using scraped data, to understand what can and what cannot be scraped, and most importantly, to learn how to scrape data.

This workshop will be an introductory level workshop in which you will learn to scrape data from websites, from Gmail and from Twitter. The good news is that such introductory knowledge is, in most cases, sufficient for social science scholars.

The structure of the workshop:

1. During the first half of the day, you will get to know the basics of programming in python. To use python, download, click and install Anaconda from http://www.continuum.io/downloads

2. During the first half of the day we will also go quickly through some very very basic HTML – you can also get a HTML introduction at code academy – http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/web

3. During the second half of the day we will go step-by-step through examples of how to scrape data from websites, Gmail and Twitter.

4. At the end of the day, each participant can work on her/his own project and the instructor will be around to help with that – it would be great if you could send an example of the things you would like to scrape a week before the workshop.

The instructor. The seminar will be conducted by Tom Coupe, Associate Professor of Kyiv School of Economics. He obtained his Ph.D from the Free University of Brussels (ULB) in 2002. His research interest include economics of education, labor economics and political economics. Tom regularly writes columns and articles for newspapers and magazines and has done consultancy work for the European Economic Association, Routledge, UNESCO and the World Bank.

You can find Tom’s CV and publications at https://sites.google.com/a/kse.org.ua/tcoupe/.

The seminar will be conducted in English. All participant should use their own laptops on the seminar.

Date and time: May 25, 2015, 9:00-18:00.

Application deadline: May 16, 2015. The number of participants is limited. Registration is not the guarantee for participation. All selected participants will receive an invitation before May 20th. 

Location: Kyiv School of Economics, Kyiv, 1, Mazepy str.

To participate please register.

The detailed description of the seminar is attached.