PPOL 5203 - Data Science I: Foundations

Week 09: Acquiring Digital Data: APIs and Selenium

Plans for Today

• Solution from last week in class exercise

• APIs

  • A simple API - Trivia API

  • More complex with Credentials: Yelp

  • Credentials + Wrapper: Youtube

• Selenium for Dynamic Websites and Audit Studies

  • Example of my own research: algorithmic bias in chinese social media websites

Office hours today: from 3pm to 5pm.
Reason? I am too anxious about the election!

Last week’s in-class exercise!

APIs

Two ways to access data from the web

• Scraping: grab information available on websites (Last Week)

  • Leveraging the structure of a website to grab it’s contents

  • Using a programming environment (such as R, Python, Java, etc.) to systematically extract that content.

  • Accomplishing the above in an “unobtrusive” and legal way.

• APIs: Data transfer portals built by companies to allow people to access data programmatically. (Today)

  • When available, we will always prefer APIs

APIs 101

• APIs: Application Programming Interface

• How does it work: online server created to facilitate information exchange between data users and the data holders

• Use Cases:

  • Access data shared by Companies and NGOs
  • Process our data with model developed by third party organizations

• We will focus today on the first component.

API Components

An API is just an URL. See the example below:

http://mywebsite.com/endpoint?key&param_1&param_2

• Main Components:

• http://mywebsite.com//: API root. The domain of your api/

• endpoint: An endpoint is a server route for retrieving specific data from an API

• key: credentials that some websites ask for you to create before you can query the api.

• ?param_1&param_2. Those are filters that you can input in apis requests. We call these filters parameters

Making an API Request

In order to work with APIs, we need tools to access the web. In Python, the most common library for making requests and working with APIs is the requests library.

• get(): to receive information from the API

• post(): to send information to the API – think about the use of ChatGPT for classification of text.

Step-by-Step

When using an API, our work will often involve the following steps:

• Step 1: Look at the API documentation and endpoints, and construct a query of interest
• Step 2: Use requests.get(querystring) to call the API
• Step 3: Examine the response
• Step 4: Extract your data and save it.

In-Class Example

We will work with three different types of APIs today:

• Trivia API: API that does not require authentication and does not have a wrapper

• Yelp API: API that does require authentication and does not have a wrapper

• Youtube API: API that does require authentication and does have a wrapper

• Wrapper:a set of functions or methods (full library) that provide a simplified interface to interact with an underlying API.

Notebook for APIs

Selenium

Static vs Dynamic Websites

• Static web pages: when the browser and the source code content match each other. Collect data via:

  • string methods and regex
  • beautifulsoup
  • scrapy

• Dynamic web pages: when the content we are viewing in our browser does not match the content we see in the HTML source code we are retrieving from the site. How to scrape?

  • Scrape the website as we view it in our browser — using Python packages capable of executing the JavaScript.

Selenium

Selenium is an open source tool which is used for automating web browser.

• works by automating browsers to execute JavaScript to display a web page

• allow us to interact with web pages programmatically

• collect data as we see in the web (after running the correspondin java script)

Drawback: selenium is a bit of a pain to install. So part of your homework will simply be to go over the selenium setup!

Notebook Selenium