Learn how to gather data from websites using Python! In this beginner-friendly workshop, you’ll learn the basics of web scraping with Beautiful Soup. We’ll show you how to dig through HTML to find the info you need, and talk about when it makes more sense to use an API or tools like Selenium. You’ll also get tips on cleaning up your data so it’s ready to use. 

By the end of this lesson, workshop attendees will be able to: 

• Use the Beautiful Soup Python package to parse through HTML (such as tags and attributes) and extract content from webpages relevant to their research questions. 

• Compare different approaches (web scraping vs. APIs) and tools (Beautiful Soup vs. Selenium) and select the most appropriate one on their skill levels and needs. 

• Understand how to clean, structure, and export scraped data to make it ready for analysis 

Instructor: Jacob Grippin, Research Facilitator, Cornell Center for Social Sciences