About

This is part of a series of informal talks, hosted by the Electronics and Technical Arts studio. It is a way for a attendees to get a taste of a new subject. Admission is free! If there is enough interest, some of these talks may become starting points for classes in the future.

Title: Introduction To Web Scraping - Make Your Computer Go To Work For You!

Speaker: Ehren J. Brav

This talk will teach the basics of web scraping and demo two applications I created: 

The first automatically searches the Seattle Mountaineers web page for trips that satisfy a couple of criteria (climbs of Rainier or Baker, trips led by leaders I like, etc.), and emails me an alert if it finds one. Putting my computer to work thus eliminated the need for me to remember to check the site! 

The second I used (with permission) to systematically download every single recording of North American bird calls that the web page Xeno-Cano collects. This ran over three consecutive nights and mirrored their database, consisting of tens of thousands of recordings. I put these into a local database so I could run machine learning applications on them.

Agenda:

- Introduction to web scraping in Python

- The "With great power comes great responsibility" talk

- Walkthrough of the two demo apps - step-by-step how they work

- Tools for web scraping: beautifulsoup, postgresql, smtplib, mechanize

Familiarity with Python is a plus but not absolutely necessary.