Research Project Management Module

  Introduction One of the things I’ve learnt recently is about research methodologies and their different strengths and weaknesses. Understanding these can be very helpful as they can focus the research and allow you to develop a plan. However, before diving deeper into this, let’s define two terms we will use throughout this post: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative – The oxford dictionary defines quantitative as relating to, measuring, or measuring by the quantity of something rather than its quality. In short, Quantitative is understood as numerical rather than based on ‘qualities’. Qualitative – Relates to ‘qualities’, such as colours, shapes, and sounds. In the research context, it will usually mean interviews with or accounts from research participants. Mixed Methods Research Some subjects lend themselves very heavily towards either qualitative or quantitative research methods. For example, papers in physics will usually use quantitative research methods. Alter...

Introduction As discussed in the previous blog post, my project is to create a Web scraper to search for recipes and filter them for allergen groups. As part of the research, I want to compare the performance of different web scraping techniques and the performance of different languages. This is quite a lot of deliverables, to begin with. Not only that, but I also want to write an extensive write-up of my development experience and my results. Furthermore, I also know that the project might change. I don’t know, for example, how successful my bots will be without building them. One reason for this would be anti-bot validation. Certain methods may be more effective if this is very prominent, which may be a whole avenue for research. As a result, project management, especially time management, will be essential for finishing this project to any degree of success. In this blog post, I will compare a few tools and charts I have found and how effective they may be. My usual approach ...

 Introduction As part of my master’s course at Sunderland University, I have been allowed to undertake a research project. The topic I have decided to research is something called Web-scraping and applying it to searching and filtering for recipes. In this blog post, I will explain what Web-scraping is, what research there is about it, and what research is still to be done. What is Web-scraping? Web scraping is the name of various techniques to extract information from web pages. Even someone manually copying and pasting content from websites has been described as web scraping. Usually, though, web scraping refers to building some software that can do this process automatically. Indeed any situation where someone or an organisation wants to extract information that is either difficult or tedious to collect or so large that it needs to be automated could apply web scraping. This includes researchers, business, finance, media, etc. The specific types of web scraping depend on t...