Project 01: Gift Expanded - Web Scraping
At the beginning of the summer term, I brought a “gift” to share with my Exploratory Making class. The gift I brought was a subwoofer constructed from a cardboard Modelo box:
To re-engage with my gift, I decided to explore web scraping. Web scraping is a powerful tool that I have been interested in for a long time, but I never engaged with it because I have never learned Python. Thankfully, I can now vibe code simple scripts reliably (most of the time).
Using ChatGPT, I vibe coded a Python script to scrape 500 pages on audio-forums.com and extract all of the words from every page. From there, I used another script to search those results for adjectives that could be used to describe human senses.
After extracting these words, I imported them to TouchDesigner, where I created an interactive cloud that displays a word when the user clicks on the screen.
The process of scraping the audio-forum websites was extremely satisfying to watch.
If I had more time, I would scrape more websites for words. I would also double check that the words are actually being used to describe a sound— many words, like “narrow” and “transparent,” could also have been used to describe physical properties of audio equipment.
