Dataharvest 2024 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Participants will write a simple web scraper in python. An LLM will be used as a coding assistant to write the scraper’s skeleton and help participants overcome obstacles. Participants will also learn that LLMs, can’t be trusted blindly:judgment and domain expertise are needed to navigate the LLM’s answers. After this session participants will be able to implement a very basic web scraper with python; use an LLM as coding assistant and understand its limitations. No coding skills are required. (Participants should be comfortable copy-pasting python code even if they don't understand 100% what it's doing) A very basic (even if abstract) understanding of what a web scraper does will help the participants follow the workshop flow. You will need to set up a (free) account with ChatGPT (https://chat.openai.com) We will be using Google Collab (a web tool) to write and execute python; no additional software is needed on your computer.