Over the course of Advanced Web Apps, a UF course that succinctly beat back-end coding into me, I became something of the Department of Corrections beat reporter.
I don't regret it. It's a topic that interests me and one I plan to continue analyzing in the future, potentially starting an Innoence Project at UF. But my professor can atest to the fact that I often have more ideas than hours in the day.
This project was no exception. For my final project, I started off wanting to build a Flask app of potential discreprancies in Florida's sentencing, highlighting about 150 prisoners. After fighting with a 2 GB Access file for a week and finally winning, at 2:30 one morning I decided to switch to showing the faces of Florida's death row. I was inspired by the Texas Tribune's project.
Why would I switch from a non-scraping Access project to a scraping project?
A few reasons:
- I will complain endlessly about scraping, but the truth is I love it. As I never got into Hogwarts, it's the closest thing to magic I've seen.
- I like doing data stories, but to truly analyze every discreprancy in the state's sentencing would have been a massive undertaking for a few weeks and between school and work, it wasn't feasible. The last thing I wanted was to produce was a half-finished project.
- This went hand-in-hand with my last project scraping information on inmates from several DOC jails. I wanted to take those skills and build upon what I learned from that, creating something more than a CSV file.
With that said, I had hoped to make this app filterable. I will likely still try and do this in the next few days to show death row inmates by race, county of crime committed and time on death row.
Oh, and GitHub decided not to work for me (and a few other people), so, please ignore the inspection files. I had to upload my files to an old repository, make a new repository through github.com and clone it. I tried deleting those files but Murphy's law. Here is a link to my gist of scraping files I used for getting the urls of the images to download and the death row inmates' information.