Engl507

APIs and ~$t

Applied Programming Interfaces (APIs) exist in a wide variety of types, including operating system APIs and programming language APIs. Today, we'll focus on web APIs, which allow you to (among other things) "pull" information from various services/domains and "mash" them together.

For some examples, see Programmable Web, Europeana, Flickr, and the DPLA. APIs can also be used to make bots, and using them involves acquiring a developer key from one or more services (e.g., here's how to get a DPLA key).

Today, we'll work with one among many API tools: Twitter CLI, or "t," for studying Twitter activity via the command line. As the instructions suggest, you'll need a Twitter account and a Twitter key, and you'll need to set your application's Access Level to "Read, Write and Access direct messages." You will also need to install "t" on your local machine.

Once it's installed and configured, walk through some of the usage examples. What did you learn? For what (if anything) might you use the Twitter API in your own research?