HacksHackers East Africa: Scraping and Cleaning Data for Insights

By Stephane Njoki

The September East Africa HacksHackers meet-up focused on data scraping and data cleaning. The session’s speaker was Joseph Dokhare, a Civic Technologist, Data Literacy Trainer and Data Analyst at Code for Africa. Joseph explained how to scrap, clean, and conduct basic data analysis.

Data scraping refers to the process of importing data from a website into a spreadsheet or locally stored file on your computer. In some cases, scrapping is often referred to as web scraping, and it’s one of the best methods for obtaining information from the internet.

Participants were trained on how to scrap web pages using multiple tools available on the internet, such as chrome scraper extension and web scraper. They also learned how to use the IMPORTHTML function to scrape tables or lists on Google sheets from web page tables and scrap PDF pages with ilovepdf.com and smallpdf.com.

Furthermore, the speaker also demonstrated how to download tabula from the internet and use it to scrap tables.

By the end of the session, the participants noted that they had gained crucial knowledge on scraping and cleaning data and generally shared positive feedback regarding the session.

The worlds of hackers and journalists are coming together, as reporting goes digital and Internet companies become media empires.

Journalists call themselves “hacks,” someone who can churn out words in any situation. Hackers use the digital equivalent of duct tape to whip out code.

Hacker-journalists try to bridge the two worlds. Hacks/Hackers Africa aims to bring all these people together — those who are working to help people make sense of our world. It’s for hackers exploring technologies to filter and visualise information, and for journalists who use technology to find and tell stories. In the age of information overload and collapse of traditional business models for legacy media, their work has become even more crucial.

Code for Africa, the continent’s largest #OpenData and civic technology initiative, recognises this and is spearheading the establishment of a network of HacksHackers chapters across Africa to help bring together pioneers for collaborative projects and new ventures.

Follow Hacks/Hackers Africa on Twitter and Facebook and join the Hacks/Hackers community group today.