Sniff, Scrape, Crawl (Prototyping)

In 2011, Sniff, Scrape, Crawl was a thematic project led by Aymeric Mansoux, Renee Turner, and Michael Murtaugh.

This prototyping module covers some of the core themes and tools around the practice of "scraping", with the goal to better familiarize yourself with the possibilities of this technique and to develop strategic uses of the tools for your specific research.

Meeting 1

Scraping Tools

Scraping tools and recipes exist at a variety of scales:

• small: Simple Web Spider in Python
• medium: Scrapy, python "framework" inspired by web frameworks like Django specifically for scraping
• large: Heritrix, full-fledged tools used for institutional scraping purposed like tradition libraries and the Internet archive (archive.org).

Meeting 2

• Workshop / Tutorials

Meeting 3

"Proof of concept" presentations

Some Examples

• focused_crawls
• Lasse's Tumblr Jumper
• Birgit Bachler's Bonus Card Friends

Links

• http://blog.osvdb.org/2014/05/07/the-scraping-problem-and-ethics/