Learn how to use web scraping in R! Join our workshop on Intermediate Web Scraping and API Harvesting using R which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series. 

Here’s some more info: 

Title: Intermediate Web Scraping and API Harvesting using R

Date: Thursday, June 15th, 18:00 – 20:00 CEST (Rome, Berlin, Paris timezone)

Speaker: Felix Lennert is a second-year Ph.D. student in Sociology at the CREST, ENSAE, Institut Polytechnique de Paris. He is a co-organizer of the Summer Institute of Computational Social Science in Paris. His research interests lie in the formation and polarization of political opinions which he tackles using a toolbox consisting of “classic” quantitative as well as text-as-data methods.

Description: Digital trace data are an integral element of CSS (cool social scientific) research. This course will show you how this is done on an intermediate level. This implies that we will not cover the fundamentals of selecting and downloading things from static web pages on the one hand, but also not go as far as firing up RSelenium to scrape dynamic web pages on the other. We will start with a brief revision of CSS selectors, then we move on to rvest to simulate a browser session, fill forms, and click buttons. In the second half of the session, APIs and how to make requests to them will be covered. Tangible examples for API queries will be shown. In the end, exemplary workflows will be introduced to provide a scaffolding for students’ future research projects.

Minimal registration fee: 20 euro (or 20 USD or 800 UAH)

How can I register?

• Go to https://bit.ly/3wvwMA6 or  https://bit.ly/3PFxtNA and donate at least 20 euro. Feel free to donate more if you can, all proceeds go directly to support Ukraine.

• Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

• Fill in the registration form, attaching a screenshot of a donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after donation).

If you are not personally interested in attending, you can also contribute by sponsoring a participation of a student, who will then be able to participate for free. If you choose to sponsor a student, all proceeds will also go directly to organisations working in Ukraine. You can either sponsor a particular student or you can leave it up to us so that we can allocate the sponsored place to students who have signed up for the waiting list.

How can I sponsor a student?

• Go to https://bit.ly/3wvwMA6 or https://bit.ly/3PFxtNA and donate at least 20 euro (or 17 GBP or 20 USD or 800 UAH). Feel free to donate more if you can, all proceeds go to support Ukraine!

• Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

• Fill in the sponsorship form, attaching the screenshot of the donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after the donation). You can indicate whether you want to sponsor a particular student or we can allocate this spot ourselves to the students from the waiting list. You can also indicate whether you prefer us to prioritize students from developing countries when assigning place(s) that you sponsored.

If you are a university student and cannot afford the registration fee, you can also sign up for the waiting list here. (Note that you are not guaranteed to participate by signing up for the waiting list).

You can also find more information about this workshop series,  a schedule of our future workshops as well as a list of our past workshops which you can get the recordings & materials here.

Looking forward to seeing you during the workshop!