This is a web scraper that produces machine-processable JSON feeds of Princeton University’s Department of Computer Science directory, sourced from the official, publicly available directory.
You can see the main JSON feed by clicking here.
There are also sub-feeds by category of persons (faculty, grad students, staff, etc.). These feeds are all updated every week on Saturday. Read on to learn more.
You can access the main (regularly updated) JSON feed directly from this URL:
https://jlumbroso.github.io/princeton-scraper-cos-people/feeds/
There are sub-feeds available for the different categories of people:
admin-staffaffiliated-facultyemeritus-facultyfacultygrad-studentsresearch-instructorsresearcherstechnical-staffFor example using Python, you can use the requests package to
get the JSON feed:
import requests
r = requests.get("https://jlumbroso.github.io/princeton-scraper-cos-people/feeds/")
if r.ok:
data = r.json()["data"]
This feed provides most people in the directory as a JSON dictionary with the following fields:
{
"email": "lumbroso@cs.princeton.edu",
"office": "035 Corwin Hall",
"degree": "Ph.D., Universit\u00e9 Pierre et Marie Curie, 2012",
"title": "Lecturer",
"name": "J\u00e9r\u00e9mie Lumbroso",
"research-interests": "Probabilistic algorithms, data streaming, data structures, analysis of algorithms, analytic combinatorics.",
"profile-url": "https://www.cs.princeton.edu/people/profile/lumbroso",
"image-url": "https://www.cs.princeton.edu/sites/all/modules/custom/cs_people/generate_thumbnail.php?id=2488&thumb=",
"image": "<base 64 encoded JPEG of the image>",
"netid": "lumbroso",
"first": "J\u00e9r\u00e9mie",
"last": "Lumbroso",
"type": "faculty"
}
Other categories of people may have other fields, such as leave, advisers, website, etc.
Previously, I had implemented JSON feeds to programmatically obtain the faculty of Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, to build the web portal for the BSE 2024 First Year Advising program.
This time, I needed to access the directory information of the Department of Computer Science graduate students. Unfortunately, like for the SEAS faculty, there is no programmatically available data source that also contains important information such as photos; the only such source is the Department of Computer Science official website.
Despite having had conversations with @sckarlin about not scraping the contents of the directory, it appeared that this was the easiest way to obtain up-to-date grad student information.
The first application for this feed will be to configure and provision the Slack profiles of the CS grad student Slack.
This repository is licensed under The Unlicense. This means I have no liability, but you can do absolutely what you want with this.