Speaker Gender Ratios in LDS General Conference

This weekend was LDS General Conference, a semiannual meeting where leaders speak to church members worldwide. After following the Twitter #GeneralConference hashtag, I became interested in the frequency of women speakers during past conferences. Using Python, I scrapped 40+ years of speaker data from LDS.org to understand the speaker gender ratio trend over time. Below is the code used and a graphic illustrating my findings.

Over the past 47 years, on average, women have comprised about 10% of the speakers per conference.

You can find the GitHub gist here and the full dataset here.

Using the Google Maps API to Visualize Chase’s Presence in Utah

I’ve been a happy Chase customer since 2010. I’ve appreciated the investment in their mobile platform and was excited about the recent You Invest announcement, allowing customers to trade 100 stocks and ETFs a year for free. With 5,100+ branches and 16,000 ATMs+ nationwide, Chase has a strong national footprint.

In this post, I use Python to recreate the map below for my home state of Utah, scrapping branch and ATM information from Chase.com and obtaining geographic coordinates using the Google Maps geocoding API.

chase-footprint
Chase branches in the U.S. in 2010. Source: Wikipedia

Before going further, I’d invite you to read Chase.com’s Terms of Use as well as Roberto Rocha’s article about the ethics of web scrapping. To avoid excessive server demands (although an unlikely issue for Chase), we’ll explicitly space out requests, made easy with Python’s time sleep method.

Scrapping Branch & ATM Information with Selenium

As usual, we’ll begin by calling the necessary libraries.

Next, we need to pass the driver a URL. Here I’ve used the Utah URL. This could easily be adapted to other states by changing the last two letters of the link.

Also note the executable path, which is pointed to the directory where my ChromeDriver is located. You can download the driver here.

When this code finishes running, the “locations” list contains location names, such as the following Utah cities:

We then convert these locations into Chase.com URLs.

The links now look like this:

The function below represents the process of scrapping the data for each location.

We’ll apply the function to each location URL to extract the corresponding branch and ATM information.

Finally, we’ll clean the information we’ve scrapped and organize it into tidy columns.

Here a sample of what the final dataset looks like:

LocationAddressType
Bountiful510 S 200 W Bountiful, UT 84010Branch
Farmington Station Park100 N Station Pkwy Farmington, UT 84025Branch
Brigham Young University800 E Campus Dr Provo, UT 84602ATM
Fashion Place6255 S State St Murray, UT 84107Branch

Geocoding Branch Address via Google Maps API

Per Google’s Get Started article, geocoding is the process of converting addresses into geographic coordinates, like latitude and longitude. Once we have a longitude and latitude combination, we can plot the branch and ATM locations on a map using Tableau or R.

Here is the Python code used to accomplish the geocoding:

Please note that you’d need to insert your own Google Cloud API key to make the code run. Finally, let’s visualize some of the data points with R!

Here’s the code to create this visualization:

You can view the data here and the complete code here. Thanks for reading!

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