Data Collector

If your research involves pulling large amounts of text data from the Internet, you can gather and process that data from the command line with a few simple Bash commands and turn it into a CSV file for your favorite statistical application, such as SPSS, R, or a MySQL table. In this article, I will show how to accomplish this with a project that examines the Romanian university dropout rate.

The data I need comes from 97 universities. For confidentiality reasons, chances are slim that I can get access to each university's database, but I can obtain that information legally from their website. (However keep in mind that many websites have licenses that prohibit web scraping. This article does not attempt to address copyright and other legal issues related to this practice. See the site's permission page and consult the applicable laws for your jurisdiction.) To gather my data, I could search for the word abandon (Romanian for dropout) on each of the 97 websites, but that would be tedious. Furthermore, each website may use a different content management system (CMS), so my search might not return the desired results. Instead, an easier option is to download all 97 websites in their entirety and recursively search their text content on my local hard drive. Linux lets you do this with the command shown in Listing 1.

Retrieving Data

In Listing 1, wget is a command-line utility in Linux and other POSIX-compliant operating systems used to download files from servers. It can be used as a mass downloader, and you can specify exactly which type of files you want downloaded and which type of files wget should disregard.

[...]