Scrapism @ SFPC, Spring 2022
Instructor: Sam Lavigne | splavigne@gmail.com Assistant Teachers: Omayeli Arenyeka and Ilona Brand Location: Online Time: Tuesdays 5-8pm ET (Section 1) and Thursdays 6-9pm ET (Section 2) Office Hours: By appointment Class Notes: (link to come)
Web scraping is the process of automatically downloading and manipulating web content. It's a common practice in silicon valley, where companies large and small transform open html pages into commodified datasets.
As an alternative, "Scrapism" is the practice of web scraping for artistic, emotional, and critical ends. By combining aspects of data journalism, conceptual art, and hoarding, it offers a methodology to make sense of a world in which everything we do is mediated by internet companies. These companies surveil us, exploit and financialize our experiences, and attempt to vacuum up every trace we leave behind. But in turn they also leave their own traces online, traces which when collected, filtered, and sorted can reveal or even intervene in power relations.
In this class participants will learn how to scrape massive quantities of material from the web with Python, and then use this source material in projects that probe the politics and poetics of the internet. We will cover multiple web scraping techniques, as well as different techniques for manipulating and presenting textual content.
