Learning to liberate data
By Anna Boiko-Weyrauch
@AnnaBoikoW
Syntax error. What does this bit of code do? Syntax error. Let’s go back to the source. Syntax error. Maybe try this?
After two hours of educated guesses, trial, error and some friendly help, Pam Dempsey, of cu-citizenaccess.org, and I had finally scraped our first bit of text: the word “2011” from a page of Illinois nursing home inspection records.
The ScraperWiki session on Thursday night was aimed at “liberating” a number of data sets from their online prisons by working late into the night scraping real websites.
The session started with a two-hour ...