Dataharvest 2024 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Have you ever come across something online that later gets changed? Sometimes the changes can be more interesting than the data itself. Wikipedia lets you see all the additions, removals, and modifications that have ever been made to an article. What if we could do something similar for any webpage? Using GitHub Actions, we can. GitHub is a site for sharing and collaborating on code, as well as keeping track of how it is being revised. A few years ago GitHub launched Actions, which lets you run that code on their servers according to a schedule. So we can set up a scraper to run on a schedule and then see how the output changes over time.Participants will leave with an understanding of how to set up GitHub Actions to run a simple scraper regularly, and then do some basic analysis on the output, including identifying changes over time. No prior knowledge is required, however you will need to have a GitHub account. Sign up before the session if you don't already have one: https://github.com/signup