Speakers Spider (PyCon 2014 sprint)

This project will:

1. scrape speakers' names from archived conference websites,
2. use SexMachine to infer gender, and
3. plot gender ratios for different conferences over time.

The Scrapy team have built a spider that scrapes information about speakers at Python conferences since 2011; please see the Scrapy installation guide for installation instructions.

To get started with the sprint:

1. Pick a currently-active conference that hasn't yet been scraped and write a Scrapy Spider for that conference. You can see conferences that have been scraped already by typing scrapy list.

2. Create a Scrapy Spider for the conference you wish to scrape, in the pycon_speakers/spiders/ directory. It should crawl as many years of the conference as possible and extract Speaker items.

3. Test your spider

4. Submit a pull request

Other tasks:

1. Improve the gender identification in pycon_speakers/pipelines.py
2. Review crawled data and fix spiders when the data is incorrect
3. Chart results

Here what we have for now:

Running the Scrapy Code

List available spiders:

scrapy list

Run a spider:

scrapy crawl us.pycon.org

Run all spiders and generate a data.csv file:

run.sh

Scrapy Cloud Test Project

See https://dash.scrapinghub.com/p/2878/

username: pycon2014
password: pycon2014