Web scraping is a flexible and powerful technique to collect data. You can use scrapers to quickly grab information for analysis and processing.

Scrapers are the backbone of our projects at the OpenAustralia Foundation, such as They Vote For You and PlanningAlerts. In this hands on, half-day workshop you’ll get experience creating a scraper with developers from the OpenAustralia Foundation. By the afternoon you’ll have written a scraper to collect data from websites daily.

Who should attend?
If you’re a data journalist, app developer, researcher, or you just need to quickly collect and track information, then knowing how to scrape data from the web will save you time and open up new opportunities.

PLEASE NOTE: To attend this workshop you’ll need some basic experience with programming, web development and using GitHub. You will need to bring a laptop to write your scraper on.

In the workshop we will be writing scrapers in the Ruby programming language, but you do not need experience with Ruby.

Beginner level knowledge in any language is fine (e.g. Javascript, PHP, Python, etc.).  You’ll be able to take what you learn and use it with any language.
This is a small, focused workshop with only 10 spaces available.

About the OpenAustralia Foundation

At the OpenAustralia Foundation we take messy data from websites and turn it into useful information for everyone to use. Web scrapers are the backbone of our projects. After years of scraping we’ve even made a free scraping platform morph.io that thousands of people around the world have used to collect millions of rows of data. Henare Degan and Luke Bacon from the Foundation will be leading the workshop.
Thanks to the Media Arts and Entertainment Alliance for hosting us.