Longitudinal Web Scraping — Repeated Automated Collection of Web Data Over Time

Longitudinal web scraping is a data collection technique that uses automated scripts to extract content from websites at multiple, predefined time points. By revisiting the same web sources repeatedly, researchers build a time-series dataset that captures how online content, prices, discourse, or behavior evolves. It is widely used in computational social science, economics, political science, health research, and digital humanities to study change without relying on retrospective self-report.