Intermediate Scraping Webinar
4h online training
22 September 2026, 9 am - 1 pm EDT New York time/ 3 -7 pm CEST Amsterdam time
Price: EUR 350
Would you like to learn how to download hundreds of social media posts at once? Have you seen the tools for open source investigators that were produced during Bellingcat hackathons, but you have no idea how to use them?
This webinar will give attendees both theoretical knowledge and practical experience of scraping websites and analysing scraped data. It will cover several different approaches to scraping and data access, including real case studies from Bellingcat research, and hands-on exercises designed to explore and address the challenges faced by open source researchers.
What you’ll learn:
By the end of this webinar you will be able to:
- Understand how scraped data can be used in an open-source investigation
- Understand what an API is and how to access data from one
- Find and use undocumented APIs with your browser’s Developer Tools
- Scrape non-social-media websites with ‘Beautiful Soup’
- Scrape public Telegram channels with ‘snscrape’
- Analyse social media data with ‘Pandas’ and ‘Matplotlib’
- Understand the challenges of maintaining social media research accounts.
What we won’t cover:
- Command line and Python syntax
- Scraping Facebook, X, or private Telegram channels
- Selenium or Playwright
Experience level:
Before attending this webinar you should have:
- Familiarity using the command line to run scripts and software
- (e.g. these commands should all be recognisable to you: ls ./, cd ../, pip install pandas)
- Some basic experience with Python (e.g. writing basic code, installing packages, importing packages)
Some familiarity with writing and running code within Google Colab is beneficial. Check out our introduction video to learn more.
This workshop is designed for those with a working knowledge of the command line. Participants without command line experience should instead register for our Command Line/ Vibe Coding webinar.
This workshop is designed for those with some Python familiarity, though you don’t need to be an expert. Without this background, it will be difficult to follow this webinar.
Logistics:
The webinar will be led by experienced Bellingcat researchers who will guide you through the topics. They have extensive open source research experience and are passionate about sharing their knowledge with you.
Zoom webinar joining details will be shared with participants in the week before the training.
Not ready for this level yet:
In case you think you’re not ready to join this webinar, please check our website for upcoming training better matching your needs.