Do you ever feel that the data you need for your research is accessible but it’s not in a convenient table, such as company reports or building plans?

Perhaps the information you need is spread out across many different documents?

If only we could read and extract structured data from thousands of written documents. 

In this course, we explore how to accomplish this task by combining web scraping, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Over four weeks, we provide online lessons and interactive sessions to learn the fundamentals of these key technologies.

In order to analyze, store, or publish digital research data, powerful software tools or even custom-made software are required. However, it is often quite challenging when the different tools are not interoperable or the overall workflows are not fully digitized, as this results in time-consuming processes with limited opportunities of collaboration. Therefore, a key objective should be to make data processing more efficient and to automate workflows. And this is where the tinkering begins!