user2016

Extracting data from the web APIs and beyond

Karthik Ram - UC Berkeley; Garrett Grolemund - RStudio, Inc.; Scott Chamberlain - rOpenSci

Tutorial Description
No matter what your domain of interest or expertise, the internet is a treasure trove of useful data that comes in many shapes, forms, and sizes, from beautifully documented fast APIs to data that need to be scraped from deep inside of 1990s html pages. In this 3 hour tutorial you will learn how to programmatically read in various types of web data from experts in the field (Founders of the rOpenSci project and the training lead of RStudio). By the end of the tutorial you will have a basic idea of how to wrap an R package around a standard API, extract common non-standard data formats, and scrape data into tidy data frames from web pages.

Background Knowledge
Familiarity with base R and ability to write functions.

Requirements
R with latest versions of httr, rvest, and curl. It would also be helpful to have a recent release of R and RStudio.

Website for Materials
All material for the tutorial will be posted at: http://ropensci.github.io/user2016-tutorial/ (including instructions on packages that you'll need to install ahead of time).