In the recent weeks I’ve collaborated on the online book APIs for social scientists and added two chapters: a chapter about the genderize.io API and a chapter about the GitHub API. The book seeks to provide an overview about web or cloud services and their APIs that might be useful for social scientists and covers a wide range from text translation to accessing social media APIs complete with code examples in R. By harnessing the GitHub workflow model, the book itself is also a nice example of fruitful collaboration via work organization methods that were initially developed in the open source software community.
While working on the two chapters and playing around with the APIs, I once again noticed the double-edged nature of using web APIs in research. It can greatly improve research or even enable research that was not possible before. At the same time, data collected from these APIs can inject bias and the use of these APIs may cause issues with research transparency and replicability. I noted some of these issues in the respective book chapters and I’ve written about them before,[1]See this article in WZB Mitteilungen (only in German) together with Jonas Wiedner. but the two APIs that I covered for the book provide some very practical examples of the main issues when working with web APIs and I wanted to point them out in this blog post.
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