January 2025 Online Short Course

Web Scraping

Web Scraping

Dr. Richard Landers

January 6-9, 2025 | 10:00 AM EST – 3:00 PM EST

Course Description

In this course, you will learn how to create novel datasets from information found for free on the internet using only R and your own computer. First, we’ll walk through a brief introduction of data source theories, web architecture, web design, and analytic approaches for scraped data. Second, we will explore the collection of unstructured data by directly scraping web pages in several small hands-on projects. Third, we will explore the collection of structured data by learning how to send queries directly to service providers like Reddit and X via their APIs. Finally, we will walk through the various ethical and legal issues to be navigated whenever planning a web scraping project.

Meet the Instructor

Richard N. Landers, Ph.D., is the John P. Campbell Distinguished Professor of Industrial-Organizational Psychology at the University of Minnesota. He is Principal Investigator for TNTLAB (Testing New Technologies in Learning, Assessment and Behavior), where his research concerns the use of innovative technologies like games, gamification, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, to improve psychometric assessment, employee selection, adult learning, and research methods. He is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, American Psychological Association, and Association for Psychological Science. His work appears primarily in psychology journals, such as American Psychologist, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Business and Psychology, and Psychological Methods, and in interdisciplinary outlets, including Computers in Human Behavior, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies and Simulation & Gaming. He is the incoming editor-in-chief for the interdisciplinary American Psychological Association journal Technology, Mind, and Behavior, author of a statistics textbook and a research methods textbook, and editor of two volumes: Social Media in Employee Selection and Cambridge Handbook of Technology and Employee Behavior. Dr. Landers has been featured in the popular press, including Forbes, Business Insider, and Popular Science, and he regularly consults with industry as president of Landers Workforce Science LLC, primarily by designing and auditing employee hiring systems incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning.