Inspiration
For this hackathon, I wanted to learn something new. After looking at the schedule and being very interested in webscaping, I decided to focus my project around that. In addition, I also wanted a visual aspect, so I found a program called Processing which I was able to learn and use to create a simple visual representation of the data.
What it does
My program webscrapes the Youtube trending page for video details, recovering the title, duration, and number of views. I chose to base the visual aspect around the number of views, so I clean away all other info and save the data to a file. Using Processing, I import the data file. The program creates circles relative to the number of views as a sort of abstract graph.
Challenges we ran into
Attempting to utilize both webscraping as well as the new Processing environment was extremely difficult, especially in combination with the short timeframe. Most of my problems were very small, niche problems that took a long time to figure out.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One of my biggest challenges was encoding data into the text file properly, because the youtube information I used happened to have an emoji or something in it, and it prevented the file from being created. I am certain that I eventually did find the optimal and "correct" solution to this problem by fixing the file write command rather than cleaning the data itself.
What we learned
I learned a ton about Processing and webscraping. Very happy with what I have learned.
What's next for Graphical Representation for WebScraped Data
My program is a bare bones example of what it could have been. I only used one dimension of the data (the veiws) and I only implemented the simplest usage of the data in Processing. Essentially, I created a framework for myself to use webscraped data in processing, and only actually implemented it in the simplest way to make sure that it worked.
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