Web scrapers for journalists: Haystax and other graphical interface systems

I’ve spent my last weeks as a Knight Lab student fellow exploring web scrapers for non-programmers through an open source browser plugin called Haystax. As a journalism student who picked up computer science, I love scraping because you create a program that acts like a reporter, tracking the information you want from web pages you specify. It’s a useful technique to save journalists time copying and pasting data from an organization’s website, and scraping can...

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