The Programming Historian has published Patrick Smyth’s (CUNY) new tutorial on creating web APIs. The guide aims to teach users how to make their data more accessible. The goals of the lesson are to:
- Learn what an API is and when you should use one.
- Learn how to build a web API that returns data to its users.
- Learn some principles of good API design, applying them to an API that draws book metadata from a database.
The tutorial also includes examples of APIs for humanities researchers and a discussion of creating APIs from a user perspective.
Author: Sarah Melton
Sarah Melton is Head of Digital Scholarship at Boston College. Her group explores and documents new tools and supports teaching and research in a variety of areas that utilize broad methodologies in the digital humanities. She is interested in questions of digital infrastructure, the philosophical underpinnings of ”openness,” and the intersection of public history and digital humanities. She has worked with Open Access Button for the past several years. Sarah holds a PhD from Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts.
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