Web-scraping with Python and Introduction to text data with Python

Technological advancements have not only driven the digitisation of society and the emergence of novel socio-political issues, but have also resulted in significant developments in algorithms, computational power, and increasingly large datasets. 

This practical-based face to face session will be delivered over two days and will provide you with both the technical programming skills and understanding of data science techniques that you will need to research pre-existing and novel social-political and economic issues and the kind of transferable skills that are currently in demand in the job market.

Text data surrounds us in our lives and comes in different shapes and sizes, e.g. newspaper articles, tweets, product reviews, song lyrics, etc. While it might seem at first glance that this information can hardly be summarized and compared, certain computational techniques allow extracting meaningful information from text data. This course provides the foundations for you to understand, execute and communicate text data analysis in a widely recognised software platform that was built for data analysis

Specifically, it will introduce additional skills using the Python programming language, and requires prior introductory experience with Python. 

This training can be standalone with prior Python experience or as a follow on from the Introduction to Python sessions, on 22nd and 23rd April 2025 Introduction to Python for Data Analysis.

Web scraping with Python

• Introduction to Google Colab (students need a functioning gmail/google account they can log into)
• Pandas dataframes and uploading external data to Colab
• How to scrape a web page and extract text with Beautiful Soup 
• How to analyse and visualise text content using the Seaborn library

Introduction to Text Data with Python

• Text preprocessing
• Bag of words modelling and count vectorizer
• Lexicon based sentiment analysis using spacy
• Comparative visualisation

By the end of the course:

• Participants will be able to use Google Colab for collaborative data science projects, and

• have improved their Python skills and be able to import and evaluate text data

Computer workshops:

Students need a functioning gmail/google account they can log into. Students can use the computers in the lab or bring their own laptops.

Pre-requisites:

Basic Python or completion of Introduction to Python for Data Analysis.

Payment using the Online Store can only be completed via Visa and Mastercard Credit/Debit Card or PayPal.  AMEX is not accepted.
If you have not previously created an account for the Online Store, you will need to create an account to make a booking.