Web Scraping The Census With PHP

By: Josh | August 20, 2007 – 12:23 pm | Filed Under: Journalism, Main Page, PHP, Personal Projects, Web / Multimedia Development | Tagged: American University , Census , Journalism , Knight Foundation , PHP , Univeristy of Maryland

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.

Filed Under: Journalism, Main Page, PHP, Personal Projects, Web / Multimedia Development

Tagged: American University , Census , Journalism , Knight Foundation , PHP , Univeristy of Maryland

This entry was written by Josh, posted on at 12:23 pm, filed under Journalism, Main Page, PHP, Personal Projects, Web / Multimedia Development and tagged American University, Census, Journalism, Knight Foundation, PHP, Univeristy of Maryland. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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