Last time I updated on my data scraping, I was scraping data about the google predictive text for fortune 500 companies. I found however, that this is a pretty finite set of data and maybe not the best for data visualization. With that in mind i decided to redirect my efforts to Craigslist.

I was poking around looking for interesting queries for Craigslist. I started by looking at the missed connections section, thinking I would map the saddest times and places in various cities by scraping the time and location of posts in that category. But it turns out someone has already done pretty extensive data visualization for Craigslist missed connections. So I instead thought about all the things sold or given away on craigslist. I found a lot of people selling paintings on Craigslist. Everything from antiques to amateur pieces and everything between. It was most interesting to me to see what kinds of pieces people took the time to document, post, and place a value on.

I began scraping the data, location, thumbnail, and title of posts matching the Craigslist search for “painting” in Pittsburgh using Kimono. I would like to use this to create an orphan Craigslist painting gallery. Or a mapping of the most expensive paintings or key words that fetch the highest/lowest prices. Possibly words by location (where are all the cat paintings?, boats or landscapes?)