Data Access

The Data Access course instructs students to gather online data: students learn how to handle some of the most common data access situations: scraping information from the Internet, interacting with APIs to get social media data, dealing with JSON and XML files, and show some publicly-available (big) data sets. They will be made aware about the database options available to them – from free software they can install on their laptops up to cloud services suited to handling terabytes of data – and learn their strengths and weaknesses so that they can effectively choose the right database or other storage methodology for different types of research task. Main covered issues: HTML, HTTP protocol (GET, POST), parsing JSON and XML data, CSS and XPath, regexprs, web-based APIs.