Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

You need to harvest data from a Web site. But there's no download button. It's time to scrape! There are many options, but one of the most consistently effective is launching an automated browser. You tell the browser where to go and what to click, and when to ingest the content. To follow along, participants should have some knowledge of coding in any language.

Participants will come away from this class knowing the basics of Web scraping with a browser emulator. To follow along, participants should have R Studio installed https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/, create a new project, download this file selenium-server-standalone-3.5.3.jar into the project directory, and have the appropriate Chrome binary downloaded into the directory https://googlechromelabs.github.io/chrome-for-testing/last-known-good-versions-with-downloads.json