Web Scraping in R

Growing amount of data is available over the web. However, this data is usually presented in an unstructured HTML format which poses a challenge to researchers who want to automatically capture the data and convert it into a form appropriate for analysis. Web scraping is a computational method that offers means to meet such challenges. In this workshop you will learn how to scrape unstructured web pages using rvest R package and prepare the captured data for analysis. You will gain some hands-on experience working on a few small projects that underlie common scraping strategies/issues. The last project will include scraping of multiple web pages.

Requirements 

• Functional knowledge of commonly used base R commands (for an overview see https://www.rstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/base-r.pdf)
• Participants will need to bring their own laptops, with R and RStudio installed prior to attending the workshop