Extracting Data from the Web: Web Scraping Using R (Online)

DATE CHANGE! This course will now be held 9/12/23. This 3 hour course will be offered via Zoom. Attendance is required as the course will not be recorded.

Sometimes you need to analyze data that is only available as a web page. This course will introduce you to extracting structured data from web pages, also known as “scraping” the pages. We will use the R programming language. The first portion of the course will introduce basic HTML, CSS selectors, Developer Tools in Google Chrome, and the R packages used for web scraping. The second portion will consist of a hands-on exercise scraping data from a real web page. After this course, you should be able to scrape data from most web pages you encounter in your research.

This course will count as 3.0 CSS short course credits.

Instructor: Matthew Wigginton Bhagat-Conway

Matthew Wigginton Bhagat-Conway is an Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning and a consultant in the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science. His research interests are in travel behavior, urban transportation, and statistical methods for transportation data analysis. He is available to assist researchers with statistics and data analysis.

Dr. Bhagat-Conway has a PhD and MA in Geography from Arizona State University, and a BA in Geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to graduate school, he was a software developer and project manager for Conveyal, a public transport planning consulting firm, and a fellow in the Data Science for Social Good fellowship at the University of Chicago.

Registration fees:

• UNC Chapel Hill Students (including current Certificate of Survey Science program students): $0, with a $25 deposit to hold your spot (deposit is refundable upon your attendance for at least 66% of the course)
• UNC Chapel Hill Faculty/Staff/Postdoc/Resident/Visiting Scholars: $50
• Non-UNC Chapel Hill University Student/Employee (must have active university email): $75
• Government/Non-Profit/Corporate: $100

Additional course information:

• Registration closes at 12:01am 9/9/23. No late registrations will be accepted.
• Cancellation/ Refund Policy: A full refund will be given to those who cancel their registration no later than 10 days prior to the course. If you cancel within the 10 days prior to the class, no refund will be given. Please allow 30 days to receive your refund.
• Zoom link for this course will be sent prior to the course. Registration must be made at least 3 days prior to the course date to receive the Zoom link.

For questions regarding the status of this class, please contact Jill Stevens at jill_stevens@unc.edu