workshop overview

workshop overview#

learning objectives#

This workshop explores approaches for programmatically extracting information from websites using web scraping and APIs. Participants will practice gathering data from the web about the recent anti-trans legislation in the US. They will work primarily with the bs4 library and learn principles from object-oriented programming to scrape and parse metadata about anti-trans legisation.

This workshop introduces:

  • the differences between web scraping and APIs and what methods are appropriate for specific use cases

  • ethical and legal considerations for web scraping

  • tools for working with HTML and web browsers generally

  • code libraries for web scraping and data analysis, like bs4, requests, and pandas

  • specific methods for extracing text from web pages

  • object-oriented programming syntax for parsing text based data

This workshop will not to make you an expert at web scraping or APIs, but it will create a solid foundation for you begin gathering data from the web, even if you are a total beginner.

anti-trans legislation#

The past couple of years have seen an explosion in anti-trans legislation that restricts basic rights and recognition for trans people. In 2023, more than 500 bills were proposed that prevent trans people from using bathrooms, playing in sports, accessing healthcare, and more in ways that accord with their gender identity. Of those 500 proposals across state legislatures, 87 passed. Compare that number with last year, 2022, 174 bills were proposed, and 26 passed. See the Trans Legislation Tracker for more information.

This workshsop uses Python to scrape basic metadata about the 83 bills that have passed in 2023. This dataset, which is relatively small in size, will be a starting point for a larger dataset to be used in our next workshop on Text Analysis. For that workshop, participants will use Python to gather, clean, and analyze the full text of the bills themselves from congress.gov. They will explore how the terms “gender” and “sex” are being defined across the legislation, among other questions about the language contained within them.

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