A scraping experiment for an Open Austin data project about appointed counsel in Texas courts.
The goal of the project is to support research by the Texas Indigent Defense Commission about the caseloads and effectiveness of appointed defense attorneys.
See the #p-indigent-defense-stats channel on https://open-austin.slack.com/ to learn more about the project.
To scrape, install the scrapy package and run:
scrapy crawl hays
See the Scrapy docs for more information.
Open Austin members have created multiple repositories with different strategies for scraping this website. In addition to this latest version based on scrapy, our inactive first prototype was based on spatula, our second scraper is based directly on requests, and we also explored using the biglocalnews court-scraper project.