Using TagUI for web scraping

gif of TagUI in action for website crawling and extraction

With Jeremy from NYP's Make Space team

Last week, I had a good time at Muis Strategy and Transformation Cluster team bonding (am tagged to them for a PSD gig). It was quite a good day as we started it off with some discussions about their future plans and there were discussions using quite vivid metaphors and analogies/stories. I liked how one of the members of the senior management weaved a story linking his recent trip to Thailand to some of the core work he and his colleagues had to manage. Another senior officer offered a garden metaphor for us to think about how a certain level of planning and structure can be beneficial. In some cases, however, the natural chaos can be beautiful too. As an organisation that is planning to move from digital starter to literate to performer, I was pleased to learn of their efforts exploring robotic process automation (RPA) and sentiment analyses to improve processes. Their current focus on data, agile and AI are good too.

The day got me thinking about how I can use my RPA skills to help with the team's futures research. I decided to look back at my mentor's notes and code on GitHub and worked on an RPA use case or sample to extract data from https://www.thefuturescentre.org/signals-insights/ using TagUI for quick reads on potentially weak signals. In my mind, the other way to source for signals is to tap on Google Trends and I have included a link and screenshot below to show how it could be done. Perhaps some of these will come in handy when getting my students to do research for any weighted assessments or exploratory projects. 

Explore search interest for islam by time, location and popularity on Google Trends - https://trends.google.com.sg/trends/explore?hl=en-US&tz=-480&geo=SG&q=islam&sni=3