From the course: Data Science Foundations: Fundamentals

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Scraping data

Scraping data

From the course: Data Science Foundations: Fundamentals

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Scraping data

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- [Instructor] "Watts Towers" in Los Angeles is a collection of sculptures and structures by Simon Rodia that are nearly 100 feet tall and made from things that he found around him: scrap pieces of rebar, pieces of porcelain, tile, glass, bottles, seashells, mirrors, broken pottery, and so on. The towers are a testament to what a creative and persistent person can do with the things that they find all around them. Data scraping is, in a sense, the found art of data science. It's when you take the data that's around you, tables on pages and graphs in newspapers, and integrate that information into your data science work. Unlike the data that's available with APIs, or application programming interfaces, which is specifically designed for sharing, data scraping is for data that isn't necessarily created with that integration in mind, but I need to immediately make a quick statement about ethics and data science. Even though it's possible to scrape data from digital and print sources…

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