web spider: digital interventions and digital poetics[A5]digital studio spring 2024
professor margaretha haughwout
A5 due Tuesday April 09 by the end of the day
In this assignment, we will engage with html and css in a new and different way, using web crawling. A web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web. It is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of indexing.
Our web crawlers will simultaneously intervene in contemporary online discourse while maintaining a fidelity to digital and networked poetics.
You will crawl a website that is regularly updated. It could be a news site, a social media site, or some other site that has regularly updated posts that are formatted in the same way with html and css for easy scraping. If you want to scrape something like X you can but know that there is a different, sometimes more gatekept process.
Using the python algorithms provided, gather and organize content from your site in such a way as to reveal a deeper meaning about said content and contemporary discourse. We will output to JSON, a common textual format for storing and sharing data.
To submit: Please link your JSON file to your website and share the link on Slack in the #assignments channel. Please also zip up the folder containing your venv and postscript folders and share this on the #assignments channel in Slack.
You will be graded on
1) conceptual: unique, artistic approach to a problem
2) perceptual: ability of have your aesthetic/ creative process reflect your concepts (form reflects content)
3) technical: your ability to implement technical lessons into project
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