ujjwalkarn/workshop — explained in plain English
Analysis updated 2026-07-17 · repo last pushed 2013-03-25
Scrape thousands of tweets about an election for political research analysis.
Extract financial tables from multiple news websites instead of copying data by hand.
Learn the basics of web scraping in R through simple, beginner-friendly toy examples.
| ujjwalkarn/workshop | hadley/logger | jacobjameson/tte_cc | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Language | R | R | R |
| Last pushed | 2013-03-25 | 2024-10-16 | — |
| Maintenance | Dormant | Stale | — |
| Setup difficulty | moderate | easy | moderate |
| Complexity | 2/5 | 2/5 | 4/5 |
| Audience | researcher | developer | researcher |
Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.
Twitter's API and scraping policies have changed significantly since 2013, so the Twitter examples likely need updating.
This repository is a collection of teaching materials from a workshop on how to gather data from the internet using the programming language R. Specifically, it covers two main skills: pulling tweets and other information directly from Twitter, and extracting data from websites. The repo contains sample code and slides designed to introduce people to web scraping, the practice of automatically collecting information from online sources rather than manually copying and pasting. The code examples are intentionally simple ("toy examples") so they're easier to follow if you're new to this kind of work. They demonstrate both how to connect to Twitter and pull tweets down, and how to grab structured data like tables from web pages, as well as messier, semi-organized content embedded in HTML code. This would be useful for researchers, journalists, or analysts who need to collect large amounts of data from the web for analysis. For instance, a political researcher might want to scrape thousands of tweets about an election, or a journalist might need to extract financial data from multiple news websites. Instead of doing this by hand, these techniques let you write a script that does it automatically, saving hours of tedious work. The workshop was put together for the NYU Politics Data Lab back in 2013, so the materials are oriented toward people in academic or political research contexts. Keep in mind that web scraping tools and APIs change frequently, and Twitter's policies around data collection have shifted significantly since then, so some of the specific code may need updating if you're trying to use it today.
A 2013 NYU workshop's teaching materials for scraping tweets and website data using R, aimed at researchers and journalists new to web scraping.
Mainly R. The stack also includes R.
Dormant — no commits in 2+ years (last push 2013-03-25).
Setup difficulty is rated moderate, with roughly 1h+ to a first successful run.
Mainly researcher.
This repo across BitVibe Labs
double-check against the repo, no cap.