Web scraping with Python

Abstract:
The internet is a trove of information. A lot of it is publicly available and thus suitable for use in research. Extracting that information and putting it in an organized format for analysis can however be extremely tedious.
Web scraping tools allow to automate parts of that process and Python is a popular language for the task.
In this workshop, we will guide you through a simple example using the package Beautiful Soup.

Setup & Software Installation:
You need to have Python installed on your device, along with the following libraries:
– Beautiful Soup library https://pypi.org/project/beautifulsoup4
– requests library https://pypi.org/project/requests
– pandas https://pypi.org/project/pandas

Presenters:
Marie-Hélène Burle. An evolutionary and behavioural ecologist by training, Software/Data Carpentry instructor, and open source advocate, Marie-Hélène Burle develops and delivers training for researchers on high-performance computing tools (R, Python, Julia, Git, Bash scripting, machine learning, parallel scientific programming, and HPC) for Simon Fraser University and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada.

Alex Razoumov earned his Ph.D. in computational astrophysics from the University of British Columbia and held postdoctoral positions in Urbana-Champaign, San Diego, Oak Ridge, and Halifax. He spent five years as an HPC Analyst in SHARCNET and in 2014 moved back to Vancouver to focus on scientific visualization and training researchers to use advanced computing tools. Alex is currently based at Simon Fraser University.

This event will be held ONLINE.