Web Scraping The Census With PHP
August 20th, 2007
The Census Bureau is a treasure trove of information about communities. But sometimes getting to the data and making sense of it takes a bit of work. It can be hard to find the data and even harder to wade through it, especially if you want to use it in a Web application. To help, Professor Wendell Cochran at American University asked me to work with him on a tutorial for journalistic datamining for the Knight Citizen News Network, a University of Maryland project sponsored by the Knight Foundation.
I built a simple PHP script that parses the American FactFinder and graphs relevant data. We used race data in our examples, but the code is easily adaptable to any FactFinder data.
Read the article and download the code at the Knight Citizen News Network Web site.
