[R tool] Google Places API

While doing research on points of interest, I coded a new R tool to retrieve research data from Google Maps. Google Maps is a great source of points of interest data, but it heavily limits the number of results. This R script recursively generates sub-queries, until all POIs have been retrieved. The results are generated … Continue reading [R tool] Google Places API →

Web scraping is legal (for UK researchers)

TL;DR: In the UK, it is mostly legal to scrape data for non-commercial research. Great for doing research from home. Much research data nowadays is sourced directly from the Web, either from traditional websites or from social media platforms. Economists, sociologists, and geographers often rely on web scraping to collect large datasets about the behaviour … Continue reading Web scraping is legal (for UK researchers) →