Python workshop, June 2020

Intro

Welcome to the "Introduction to Programming, Web Scraping, and Data Cleaning in Python" workshop! The goal of this workshop is to increase data fluency of the Brown community. In the first two weeks of the workshop, we learn Python basics. In the third week, we use web scraping to collect data from the web. Web scraping allows us to automate data collection from websites of varying underlying formats. In the fourth week, attendees learn to clean and process the scraped data using the pandas library.

The live workshop runs for four weeks four hours a day. We have a two hour lecture and a two hour lab session to practice coding.

Tools

We use JupyterHub during the workshop. The Brown JupyterHub is designed to provide an environment to run Jupyter Notebooks for Python, Julia, R, and other languages without the need to install any software or packages. The users interact with JupyterHub through a web browser. This service is a collaboration supported by various teams in CIS. To learn more about the hub, please check out the documentation here.

Links to materials

The table below contains links to the materials. The lecture will open the notebook in the hub, the video links to the youtube recording. Just FYI if you follow the workshop asynchronously in June 2020, the video will only be available a day or two after the lecture link is posted.

	lecture	video
day 1 - Variables part 1	here	here
day 2 - Variables part 2	here	here
day 3 - Container types part 1	here	here
day 4 - Container types part 2	here	here
day 5 - Control flow part 1	here	here
day 6 - Control flow part 2	here	here
day 7 - Control flow part 3	here	here
day 8 - Functions part 1	here	here
day 9 - Functions part 2	here	here
day 10 - Packages	here	here
day 11 - Web Scraping, Basics	here	here
day 12 - Web Scraping, Wikipedia	here	here
day 13 - Web Scraping, Multi-page Queries	here	here
day 14 - Pandas, part 1	here	here
day 15 - Pandas, part 2	here	here
day 16 - Visualization, part 1	here	here
day 17 - Visualization, part 2	here	here

Contact

The instructors are Ashley Lee (ashley_lee@brown.edu) and Andras Zsom (andras_zsom@brown.edu).

Acknowledgements

We thank the Data Science Initiative at Brown University for sponsoring the workshop. We are grateful to Isabel Restrepo and Fernando Gelin for assisting with the JupyterHub; Matt Slivinski and Camilo Diaz for helping out during the lectures and afternoon sessions.