README

ABOUT----------------------

Dartmouth Dining Service Menu Analysis
started by D. Parker Phinney, late Fall 2009

This is a project to do some analysis on Dartmouth Dining Service (DDS).
I'm open to taking this project in other directions, but right now here's what I'm thinking:

*Archive daily menus (as reported on the website).
**I'd like to get a full calendar years' worth, but just one full quarter would be great also
*Parse and index those menus (keeping a copy of the original archive, of course)
**Organize it so that I can pull useful statistics by issuing queries
*Run some statistical analysis, see what pops out, make a pie graph, and assemble a fancy-looking paper
*Repeat
*????
*PROFIT!!!!

Why?
*I want to get better at web scraping, especially web scraping with python and especially web scraping to do analytics
**Like what these kiddies do: http://www.webecologyproject.org/
*I decided to go veg in the middle of Fall '09.  I was disappointed with how few vegetarian options the dining service offered.


FILES------------------------
code/
	menu-scraper.py
		scrapes out daily menus from the dds website.  i run this with a cron job every day.
	menu-parser.py
		parses daily menus to grab all the useful data. (incomplete, as of jan 3rd 2010)
data/
	raw-menu-scrapes/