Justin Davis is the Next Speaker in the Anne and Edgar Basse Jr. Author Talk Series Davis will deliver a lecture titled “Web Scraping for Research on Novel Data” on campus on March 27.
Justin Davis, assistant professor of business administration, will deliver a lecture on “Web Scraping for Research on Novel Data” at Washington and Lee University at 12:30 p.m. on March 27 in the Harte Center Gallery inside Leyburn Library. The talk is free and open to the public.
The lecture is sponsored by the Williams School of Commerce, Economics and Politics and the University Library and is part of the University Library’s Anne and Edgar Basse Jr. Author Talk series, which invites W&L faculty to showcase their scholarship to the campus community. The Basse series is made possible by the Anne W. and Edgar A. Basse Jr. (’39) Endowment, which was created in 1988 to support the varied activities of the University Library Special Collections & Archives.
In his talk, Davis will share how web scraping – automated internet data collection – has impacted his research throughout his academic career. He will discuss how his work with web scraping has progressed from gathering financial data to capturing descriptions from Kickstarter campaigns to collecting information on political contributions made by business executives. These advancements support his research on topics such as board gender diversity, what makes crowd-funders successful and how a CEO’s political beliefs affect their organization.
“When asked to talk about the process of my research, web scraping came to mind immediately,” said Davis, who is also a faculty member of W&L’s Data Science Program. “From my earliest days as a PhD student, the need for data I could only capture with web scraping sparked my interest in learning to program for research applications. This journey ultimately led me to join the W&L faculty and remains pivotal to the research projects related to executive political ideology I’m working on today.”
Davis’s primary research focuses on enhancing corporate accountability by identifying governance characteristics that contribute to accurate financial reporting. He is particularly interested in how executive characteristics impact organizational outcomes and most recently developed a methodology for measuring executive political ideology. Davis has coauthored research that has been published in the Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money; the Journal of Financial Reporting and Accounting; the Journal of Economics, Finance and Administrative Science; and Pathobiology.
Davis joined W&L’s faculty in 2022. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz and his master’s degree and Ph.D. from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
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