A solution to the Death Penalty data scraping/parsing homework has been posted, with some explanation and pointers.
The Wednesday class (Feb. 4) will be optional. We'll still meet up in the classroom but I'll spend more time reviewing things, checking up where people are, and hope to have midterm standings by the end of this week. Come to class if you still want to make sure you're good on the fundamentals of what we've covered so far.
For Monday (Feb. 2), we'll be discussing how to programmatically create HTML, which, for our purposes, just means working with more text.
Besides the assigned homework that's due, you should be trying to authenticate with Twitter's API.
By next week, I'll have a new four-part assignment up that will very much be the same as the Death Row Parsing assignment, except it will deal with Congress and lobbying. Here are the relevant background links, you can probably guess what the assignment will entail: