Brandon Taylor

11 Feb 2014

I scraped property information from the Allegheny County website.  Originally, the mapping project had got me thinking about mapping property values.  Unfortunately, the two projects didn’t totally come together (I’d need to convert address data from the Allegheny website to geo data via google maps or something).

I used BeautifulSoup to write a scraper that just iterated through parcel and lot numbers and pulled off addresses, land size, purchase prices & dates, and land & building values.

I got hung up using d3.  I don’t do a lot of web programming.  Though it turned out the biggest problem was with trying to access a local file.  After I figured that out, I didn’t have much time to do anything interesting beyond just plotting the data.

ScrapeViz

 

The implementation was largely taken from Jerome Cukier’s blog.

Also, I couldn’t get the embedded d3 stuff to work.  It seemed like no one did?