Norah Abokhodair, PhD

I am sure many of you would like some help scraping – scraping is a technique of extracting information from websites – the posts of a specific Facebook group. For example, when I was working on one of my early projects entitled Youth, ICTs, and Democracy in Egypt with the Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA) at the UW – Information School, we needed to undergo a qualitative coding exercise for approximately 700 Facebook posts from the April Youth Movement Facebook group.  However, at the time of data collection, Facebook’s format did not enable users to browse through old posts. Additionally, the number of daily posts was immense; manual collection would have been prohibitively time-consuming. Therefore, I quickly realized the need for an application to save me  time while collecting Facebook posts. In order to collect Facebook posts, we developed an application using the Facebook Graph application programming interface (API), which is a way for developers to access Facebook data and build applications. 

This is the link to the application http://groupbrowser.azurewebsites.net/

How to Use the Application: 

1. At the beginning Log in with your Facebook account.

2. After logging in, add the name of the Facebook group that you want to extract the posts from  ( I recommend copying it from Facebook)
3. Add the start Date of the posts you want to display
4. Add the end Date of the posts you want to display
5. Add the Number of posts
6. Click Submit

The results are going to show in a bulleted list for readability and ease of use.

I really hope you could benefit from using this free application and feel free to ping me if you had any questions or concerns. Also, I would like to hear from you, what do you think of the App ? Would it be beneficial for you ?

Update: I just published a new post for the Facebook Page Scrapper!