Date: November 9th

Time: 11:00 AM EDT

Description: The internet is a treasure trove of data, if you know how to collect it. In this two part series of webinars, we will examine easy ways to collect different types of data from the web with R. In Part 1 (November 9th), we will use the httr package to collect data that is provided through web APIs. APIs are a popular and efficient way to share data online. If someone purposefully collected your data to share online, there is a good chance that they are sharing it through an API. Unfortunately, not all APIs work the same way, and how they are implemented depends largely on the developer. In this webinar, we will look at the basic components of HTTP, the language that underlies web APIs. You will learn how to make HTTP requests to an API with the httr package, and how to use best practices when making HTTP GET requests from APIs with R. In Part 2 (November 30th), we will use the rvest package to extract data that is not provided through an API from the web. How do you collect data that the web developer hasn't packaged nicely in an API for your consumption? By searching for the data in the page's HTML structure and extracting it in a surgical way. The rvest package contains several tools that make this process easy and automatable. We will examine these tools along with the background knowledge of HTML and CSS that they depend on.