Scraping data from the Internet has become a key skill for many investigations and reporting projects that rely on data. Building custom web scrapers used to require solid coding skills but in two recent environmental investigations supported by the Pulitzer Center, we used Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Claude to help us build scrapers for online content without much coding skills. This hands-on workshop will teach you how to inspect a website and choose a scraping strategy. Then it will demonstrate, step-by-step, how to build web scrapers that have been used in the investigations. LLM prompts will be shared and participants can follow along to create their first custom web scraper.
After attending you will understand website structure for scraping and be able to use LLMs to build basic web scrapers.
Participants should come with their own laptops, register a free account on any of the main LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude) and have a free Google Colab account at colab.research.google.com.
No coding skill is required but basic familiarity with LLMs is recommended.
Materials:
https://github.com/kuangkeng/dataharvest2026-ai-scraper
