Prerequisites: 

Students are expected to be familiar with the statistical software R. Besides base R, knowledge about the “tidyverse” packages, in particular, dplyr, plyr, magrittr, and stringr, are of help. If you are familiar with R but have no experience in working with these packages, the best place to learn them is the primary reading “R for Data Science”.

Description: 

The short course provides a condensed overview of web technologies and techniques to collect data from the web in an automated way. To this end, students will use the statistical software R. The course introduces fundamental parts of web architecture and data transmission on the web. Furthermore, students will learn how to scrape content from static and dynamic web pages and connect to APIs from popular web services. Finally, practical and ethical issues of web data collection are discussed.