Digital Skills: Introduction to Web Scraping and Text Analysis in R

Dozent/in	Dr. Nicolas Attalides
Veranstaltungsart	Workshop
Code	HS261721
Semester	Herbstsemester 2026
Durchführender Fachbereich	Diverse
Studienstufe	Master Doktorat
Termin/e	Sa, 07.11.2026, 09:30 - 16:30 Uhr Sa, 14.11.2026, 09:30 - 16:30 Uhr Sa, 21.11.2026, 09:30 - 16:30 Uhr
Umfang	Blockveranstaltung
Inhalt	The R programming language offers a huge variety of statistical analysis solutions with over 23,000 packages available to install and continues to expand in areas like visualization, text analysis and machine learning. This course focuses on collecting data from the web applying a technique called web scraping. Participants will learn how to use R packages that specialise in processing HTML to gather data. In addition, this course aims to introduce participants the area of Natural Language Processing and perform data manipulations and semantic analysis on the text data that was collected.
Lernziele	This course is split into three parts: Part 1: • Introduction to the basic concepts of HTML structures of a webpage • Learn how to collect text data using web scraping R packages Part 2: • Practical/hands-on exercises for web scraping using R Part 3: • Introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and some key concepts • Learn how to do text mining and text manipulations • Learn how to use tokenization and stop words and how to perform sentiment analysis
Voraussetzungen	Course participants are expected to have some basic knowledge of the R programming language. Prior experience in basic data analysis (such as data manipulation and visualisation) would help the learning experience but is not required. Participants should have their own laptop with R, RStudio and the relevant packages installed.
Sprache	Englisch
Begrenzung	Only Master or doctoral students (postdoctoral researchers can sign up via lumacss@unilu.ch). Priority for LUMACSS students if there are too many registrations.
Anmeldung	***Important*** To earn credits, you must register for the course via UniPortal. Registration is open from two weeks before to two weeks after the start of the semester. You can withdraw from the course after this period by notifying the lecturer and lumacss@unilu.ch. You can find the registration details here: http://www.unilu.ch/ksf/semesterdaten
Leistungsnachweis	There is no examination. Participants are expected to actively engage in the hands-on components of the workshop. Successful participation is awarded 1.5 ECTS.
Abschlussform / Credits	Bestätigte Teilnahme / 1.5 Credits
Hörer-/innen	Nein
Kontakt	lumacss@unilu.ch
Material	Instructions for the technical setup will be circulated via e-mail by the instructor during the week before the (first session of the) course. Learning material such as slides, code and solutions to exercises will be circulated by the instructor after the course.