STA 9750
Week 11 Update
2025-04-24

Michael Weylandt

Agenda

Today

  • Administrative Business
  • Review: Identifying HTML Elements
  • New Material: Extracting HTML with rvest
  • Looking Ahead

Administrative Business

STA 9750 Mini-Project #03

First few submissions look great!

For the rest of you, extension until tomorrow midnight

Will assign PF on Saturday

  • Extended until next Sunday (May 4th) at 11:45pm

Pay attention to the rubric

STA 9750 Mini-Project #04

MP#04 released today

  • Due 2025-05-07 at 11:45pm ET (\(\approx\) 3 weeks)
  • Topic: Political Mapping
    • Recreation of NYT “county shift” map
  • Format:
    • Political Hack - Play the role of a TV “Talking Head”
    • GitHub post AND Brightspace submission

STA 9750 Mini-Project #04

Assignment Modification

  • I’m going to make the ‘writing’ parts of this assignment extra credit
  • Task 6 is not required (Task 4 still is)

If you don’t want to write propoganda, just write Task 4 as straight answers

Going Forward

Pre-Assignments

Brightspace - Wednesdays at 11:45

  • Reading, typically on course website
  • Brightspace auto-grades
    • I have to manually change to completion grading

Next pre-assignment is 2025-04-30 at 11:45pm ET

I am behind on reading PA comments:

  • For anything urgent, please contact me directly🙏

Grading

I owe you:

  • MP#02 peer meta-review fixes
  • Mid-Term Check-In Feedback

Course Support

  • Synchronous
    • Office Hours 2x / week
      • MW Office Hours on Tuesdays + Thursday
  • Asynchronous
    • Piazza (\(\approx 20\) minute average response time)

Upcoming

Semester end is coming quickly!

  • MP#04
  • Final presentations
  • Final reports

That’s it!

Observation Comments

Thank you!

Large Files

Several of you have reported issues with git complaining about large files

git ls-tree -r -t -l --full-name HEAD | sort -n -k 4 | tail -n 10

SO on Removing Large Files:

git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm -rf --cached --ignore-unmatch data/**' HEAD

⚠️This is dangerous! I can help with it after class.⚠️

Review: Identifying HTML Elements

Pre-Assignment #11 FAQs

FAQ: HTML vs CSS

What is the difference between HTML and CSS?

HTML is substance; CSS is style

Distinction can be a bit blurry & CSS can live “inside” HTML

Example

FAQ: a in SelectorGadget

Why does [SelectorGadget] display “a” in the selector when selecting a web link?

a is for anchor.

Confusingly, anchors are both links and destinations.

Anchors can reference:

  • Another page (http://URL)
  • A particular part of another page (http://URL#place)
  • A particular part of the same page (#place)

Quarto supports cross-linking with anchors

FAQ: SelectorGadget - Multiple Clicks

Why does SelectorGadget go “unique” when I click multiple elements of interest?

Can’t find a common structure:

  • Typically a problem within lists or common element types

FAQ: Selectors - Nesting

How to avoid unwanted elements such as headers or sidebars, focusing only on the main content I need?

Nest your selectors!

thing1 thing2 will select only thing2s inside a thing1

StarWars page

Try main h2

FAQ: Relationship to Markdown

Is [HTML] similar to Markdown ?

Markdown is an easier way to write (a subset of) HTML

Name is a bad joke: Markup (M in HTML) vs Markdown

HTML can (theoretically) do more, but painful to write by hand

FAQ: Messy HTML

How can we target data with CSS Selectors in messy HTML?

Pain and suffering - depends how messy.

Worst case: a little bit of HTML selection + text processing (next week)

HTML Review

  • HTML Structure
  • CSS Selectors (SelectorGadget)
  • Introduction rvest

Pre-Assignment Exercises

main h2

table or tbody

.geo

New Material: rvest

Live Demo: rvest

Exercise 1: CUNY Map

Recall Lab 1. Goal: extend map to all CUNYs

Steps:

  1. Read CUNY table and extract links
  2. Follow links and pull coordinates
    • To read geo class, use this:
  1. Adapt Lab 1 leaflet to show all locations

Breakout Rooms

Room Team Room Team
1 Team Mystic 5 Money Team + CWo.
2 Subway Metrics 6 Lit Group
3 Noise Busters 7 Cinephiles + VG
4 AI Impact Col 8

Exercise 2: Cocktails

Goal: create a cocktail data frame from Hadley’s Recipies

Today:

  • How to find them all?
  • How to extract individual recepies?
  • How to pull items from each recipie?

Next time:

  • How to convert text to numeric values + column info
  • Data wrangling

Looking Ahead

Upcoming Mini-Projects

  • MP#04: Exploring Recent US Political Shifts

Seeking suggestions for next semester

  • Course Feedback Survey

Upcoming

Next Week (After Spring Break):

  • MP#03 Peer Feedback
  • Pre Assignment

Longer Term:

  • MP#04
  • Final Presentations

Life Tip of the Week

End of the Semester is Upcoming

  • End of the semester is rough
    • More important than ever to plan ahead
    • Ask for extensions / accomodations early
    • Help us help you
    • Faculty are slammed as well
  • Don’t ‘grade grub’
    • Makes it harder for professors to curve in your favor
    • Seek extra credit from the syllabus
    • Don’t ask for special treatment - ask how to take advantage of existing opportunities
  • Take care of yourselves
    • Nasty bugs going around …