What is an API?
– API stand for Application Programming Interface
– allows software to interact with a website
– API calls consist of requests and response of structured data
Example: Twitter
– Collect tweets:
1) User timeline: GET statuses/user_timeline; gets most recent tweets posted by a year, limited to last 3,200 tweets, returns 200 at a time, so must page, rate limit: 900 tweets per 15 minutes. Examples: Collect individual news organizations, individual members of congress.
2) Search: GET search/tweets; search recent tweets (sample of tweets from last 7 days), returns up to 100 at a time, so must page, not the same as search on Twitter website, rate limit: 180 tweets per 15 minutes. Example: Get tweets from an event.
3) Filter Stream: POST statuses/filter; Real-time filtering of all public tweets; continue to receive additional tweets over a single call to API. (No paging.) Limits: when high volume, will not receive all tweets. One stream at a time per set of credentials. Example: Women’s March.
– You can never assume that you have all the data.
– Resources for Twitter data: DocNow (Tweet Catalog); TweetSets
-According to Twitter’s terms, you cannot share the complete tweets, you have to share the tweet IDs.
-Once a tweet has been deleted, it cannot be shared.
-How do you collect twitter data?
Twarc: github.com/docnow/twarc
Twurl: github.com/twitter.twurl
Social Feed Manager: go.gwu.edu/sfmgw
Tags: tags.hawksey.info
Example: Facebook
– Graph API Explorer
– JSON
– collect by node.
– can only collect public pages
