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  • How I built my first mobile app scraper

    Scraping web pages is a well documented process. There are plenty of guides on how to pull information using plugins like Python’s Beautiful Soup or browser extensions like Kimono. Many web applications even provide public APIs for gathering information, such as Facebook’s Graph API. Yet, there is a growing set of popular mobile apps that do not have a public API. Apps like Yik Yak, Tinder, and others contain a wealth of information about the...

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  • Five data scraping tools for would-be data journalists

    This past Fall, I spent time with the NPR News Apps team (now known as NPR Visuals) coding up some projects, working mainly as a visual/interaction designer. But in the last few months, I’ve been working on a project that involves scraping newspaper articles and Twitter APIs for data. I was a relative beginner with Python — I’d pair coded a bit with others and made some basic programs, but nothing too complicated. I knew...

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  • A beginner's guide to collecting Twitter data (and a bit of web scraping)

    As a student fellow at the Knight Lab, I get the opportunity to work on a variety of different projects. Recently, I’ve been working with Larry Birnbaum, a Knight Lab co-founder, and Shawn O’Banion, a computer science Ph.D. student, to build an application that takes a user’s Twitter handle, analyzes their activity and returns a list of celebrities that they tweet most like. It’s not an earth-shattering project, but it is a fun way for...

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