Auto-updating US Jobless Claims Visualization README

Introduction

📊 This repository hosts an innovative project that automatically scrapes, processes, and visualizes the US Department of Labor's weekly jobless claims data.

Workflow Details

Step 1: Data Scraping and Processing

• Tool Utilization: Utilizes BeautifulSoup for web scraping and Camelot for PDF data extraction.
• Data Handling: Extracts relevant data from the Department of Labor's PDFs, cleans, and converts it into a structured CSV format (statewise-claims.csv).

Step 2: GitHub Integration

• Repository Management: Involves setting up a GitHub repository to store and manage the project's code and data.
• Automation with GitHub Actions: Implements GitHub Actions to automate the scraping process using a YAML (.yml) configuration file.

Step 3: Webpage Development

• HTML Page Creation: Designs an HTML page (index.html) for data visualization.
• Deployment via GitHub Pages: Employs GitHub Pages for hosting the visualization webpage, enabling public accessibility.

Step 4: Data Visualization and Embedding

• Visualization Tool: Creates an interactive chart using DataWrapper, providing an insightful and user-friendly representation of the data.
• Embedding in Webpage: Integrates the visualization into index.html using embed codes from DataWrapper.
• Update and Deployment: Regular updates to the visualization are pushed to GitHub Pages, ensuring the data displayed is current.

Contribution and Collaboration

🤝 Contributions are highly encouraged. Feel free to fork the repository, make improvements, and submit pull requests. Open issues for any bugs or feature suggestions.