Scraping Political Data Workshop

Meet Paolo Cirio, subversive media artist. Investigated by the Department of National Defense of Canada and an unnamed body of the government of the USA for DDOS attacks on NATO's website at the age of 22.  Part of the LEGEND-....wait for it...-ARY net-art collective Epidemic (the source of viruses and P2P software that you are not cool enough to know about).  Italian.  Badass.

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Meet Paolo Cirio, subversive media artist. Investigated by the Department of National Defense of Canada and an unnamed body of the government of the USA for DDOS attacks on NATO's website at the age of 22.  Part of the LEGEND-....wait for it...-ARY net-art collective Epidemic (the source of viruses and P2P software that you are not cool enough to know about).  Italian.  Badass.

 

This one-day workshop will introduce the basic philosophy behind transparency activism and how to apply it practically through the use of smart hacks over web platforms. It will reveal smart ways to access data that is considered public but held hostage by its containers. The practical session of the workshop will introduce some simple software, coding, techniques and tricks to extract data from websites with almost no coding at all (no previous coding experience is required to attend this workshop)!

 

Access and fair use of Open Data is becoming pivotal for accelerating the development of our society. Although many governmental and private institutions have recently started to provide their rich data to the public, there is still a long way to go in order to reach the level of true transparency. For example, the unsolved legal case of WikiLeaks made a historical point about the political power of information when it was opened up and fairly distributed thanks to information technology.

 

Part of the workshop will use Air Quality Egg as a framework for discussion and examples of how to implement these techniques.  We will be scraping air quality data into COSM!

 

Participants should bring a laptop.

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