Sep 3, 2025: Collecting Research Data: Webscraping at Robert Manning Strozier Library
About this Event
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Reddit hosts a vast and dynamic collection of user-generated content that can offer valuable insights for research across the humanities, social sciences, information sciences, and beyond. This hands-on workshop introduces graduate students to the basics of collecting structured data from Reddit using its official API. Participants will learn how to register for API credentials, authenticate requests, and write Python scripts to extract posts, comments, timestamps, user data, and subreddit metadata. We will cover ethical considerations, including Reddit’s content policies and norms regarding public data, as well as practical techniques for filtering and organizing scraped content for analysis using PRAW, Pandas, and other tools. No prior experience with APIs or Python is required. This beginner-friendly session will walk through each step of the process. By the end of the workshop, students will be equipped to build their own Reddit datasets tailored to their research questions. Participants are encouraged to come with subreddit topics or research ideas in mind.
Please contact this QEP's instructor, Aaron Rodriguez, if you have questions about workshop content.
Please arrive at the workshop at least 5 minutes before the start time. Please have your FSU Card ready for check-in. Check-in ends 10 minutes after the scheduled start time and late arrivals will not be admitted.
The Graduate Skills Workshop series is a collection of workshops developed in collaboration with the Graduate School and the Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) to support graduate research and success.
For questions regarding Research and Creative Activity Travel Grants, please contact the Graduate Student Resource Center.