Many websites provide Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow users to access data and services via simple web queries. For example, you might want to retrieve a historic image, harvest the latest tweets, or run sentiment analysis on a text. This session will use several examples to introduce the basics of understanding and using server-side web APIs, including the IIIF image API, Chronicling America historic newspaper API, and Text Processing Sentiment Analysis demo. We will learn how to construct queries as HTTP GET and POST requests to retrieve information from services, and introduce ways to integrate them with tools such as commandline, programming languages, or OpenRefine.

No programming experience is necessary.