An introduction to using Python in the newsroom at IRE 2015 in Philadelphia.
Follow along with the slides.
We'll learn the basics of coding in the newsroom by scraping the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's website for its list of death row inmates and its list of scheduled executions.
Because we don't want to hammer the TDCJ website, I've mirrored the pages on s3, so first we'll be scraping the scheduled executions: https://s3.amazonaws.com/python-at-ire15/death_row/dr_scheduled_executions.html Then we'll do the list of all death row inmates, adding a column to our scraper: https://s3.amazonaws.com/python-at-ire15/death_row/dr_offenders_on_dr.html
A rough outline of the two, 1-hour sessions:
Hour One:
- Why code at all and why Python?
- Strings, ints, variables, and lists. Everything you need to know about programming you probably learned in Excel
- How the hell do you scrape a website? A quick exercise in breaking down a problem into components and writing functions.
Hour Two:
- Let's code this together
- Now you try it on the list of other death row inmates (add one column and a loop)!
- There's so much weirdness in coding and quirks to any programming language, we can't possibly do it all in two hours. So here are some resources.