2020-01-31 (Creation date: 2020-01-31)

Johannes-Marahrens, Helge

In recent years, social scientists have increased their efforts to access new datasets from the web or from large databases. An easy way to access such data are Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This workshop introduces techniques for working with APIs in Python to retrieve data from sources such as Wikipedia or The New York Times. It is intended for researchers who are new to working with APIs, but are familiar with Python or have completed the Introduction to Python workshop.

In this workshop, we will retrieve data from the ProPublica Congress API. If you plan to follow along the code scripts, please take a few minutes to request a personal API key before the workshop: https://www.propublica.org/datastore/api/propublica-congress-api. Computers with Python 3 and libraries (requests, json, pandas, matplotlib, bs4, wikipedia) pre-loaded are available in the SSRC on a first-come, first-served basis.

This workshop is the second in a three-part series, followed by “Introduction to Text Mining for Social Scientists” (February 14, 2020).

IU Workshop in Methods

Workshop in Methods

Social Science Research Commons

Accompanying materials on IUScholarWorks ; "Introduction to Python for Social Scientists" workshop video 

Performers
Helge-Johannes Marahrens is a third-year doctoral student in the department of Sociology at Indiana University, working toward a PhD in Sociology and an MS in Applied Statistics. His research interests include cultural consumption, stratification, and computational social science with a particular focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP).