Serena S. Stein

In this webinar, we convene a group of speakers and participants aiming to build literacy of the Big Data technique called webscraping, offering a) in-depth orientation to free and proprietary programs that enable webscraping; b) application of webscraping to several anthropological projects being reimagined under the logistical and ethical constraints of fieldwork during Covid-19; c) skill-building on possible analyses and interpretation of webscraped data ‘ especially exploring meaning, biases and limitation in contexts of novel digital media access in Africa; and d) tools and resources for digital data protection as well as ethical quandaries of webscraping methods.

The focus is to help gain literacy of the possibilities and constraints of the method, so that anthropologists can begin to incorporate a digital media perspective. Participants will be able to team up with a research assistant who is more familiar with programming, as they lead the research design and analysis based on skills gained in the webinar.