About the ANR-Lab summer school 'Web-scraping and API for social scientific research'

On August 5, the summer school 'Web-scraping and API for social scientific research', conducted by ANR-Lab employee Lika Kapustina, ended.

For almost two months, participants learned to independently collect and process data from web pages and through APIs using Python. The school was as practice-oriented as possible: each lesson was a small project on collecting and processing data. In addition to practicing Python, at each lesson, participants discussed what social scientific research can be carried out based on the data collected in the lesson, as well as ethical issues of using such data.

At the final lesson, school participants, under the guidance of ANR-Lab members, presented their own projects based on collecting data from open sources. Among the works – a study of the professions of Data Scientist and Data Analyst (based on data from job sites HH.ru, SuperJob, Indeed), scientific fields of economics and entrepreneurship, sociology (based on OpenAlex data), as well as a study of policies for the use of personal data (based on data collected from websites of Russian IT companies).

Feedback from participants:

Maxim Skorobogachev

1st year student of the program 'Political Science', HSE University

What I liked most about the course was the practical orientation of the classes and the analysis of the intricacies of working with parsing. Writing code and working with documentation are pretty obvious things, and these intricacies can only be learned from experience. For me personally, as a person far from the structure of sites, the most useful topic was html markup. Also useful is the ethical and legal component of parsing, as a warning.

Ksenia Anfimova

4th year student of the program 'Public Policy and State Strategies', RANEPA

The impressions from the summer school were extremely positive. First of all, this was influenced by the amount of information that we were able to comprehend. We received so much material in our classes that we will need to return to it for a long time and work on it independently. It is rare to find such an extensive training program within the framework of a summer school. Secondly, the time, schedule and organizational plan itself were conveniently chosen. There was a feeling that we were gradually complicating our process and from this I felt my own progress. Despite my zero knowledge in the topic, this is an excellent start for studying and understanding the essence of the subject as a whole.

Mikhail Frolov

1st year student of the Master's program 'Complex Social Analysis', HSE University, research intern at ISSEK

Thank you for the course, it was very useful and interesting! Finally, some systematicity began to come into my knowledge and data collection skills :)

Thanks to Lika for the wonderful classes, all the participants and curators for their active participation! And see you at other ANR-Lab events!