Studio CHI presents a "Play in the Dirt" Workshop with John Gallagher. This workshop introduces participants to the concept of web scraping (i.e., pulling large amounts of text off the internet) for the purposes of scholarly research. Discussion begins with an introduction to the concept of web scraping using selected applications to concretize its significance. The ethical, political, and economic implications of web scraping for humanities-based research are also addressed.

In the second part of the workshop, participants carry out guided web-scraping on a YouTube user profile using Google sheets and the xpath query language.

The final section of this workshop will involve a guided brainstorming session for attendees’ research projects, focused on the benefits of web scraping and steps/resources for learning more advanced web scraping techniques.

This workshop will not involve any computer code.

John Gallagher is Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 

To RSVP, please email StudioCHI@depaul.edu