At iDigBio we did a web APIs section at the end of our 4 day field to database workshop for museum collectors and curators. It went over ok. The state of R packages is such that we ended up with about 50% success in getting people's machines to work. I chose to do the format where students work from a partially completed R script since some of the typing is long and most of the attendees had just seen R for the first time the day before. Stuff like "this returns JSON nested lists which we'll pull out and make in to a dataframe with lapply...." wasn't something they were going to come up with on their own.
I did the first part of the presentation in Indonesia to a group of 50/50 CS/Forestry students and it was also ok though it was packed into a short amount of time and was missing the hands on parts in a programming language. Still, maybe 20% of the room lit up and it wasn't all CS students. I'd love to spend more time on it since it's a really empowering skill. I don't have any preference as to R vs Python. Please let me know if anyone wants to work on this. Presentations: https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/images/2/21/2015-03-12-F2DB-Apis.pdf https://www.idigbio.org/wiki/images/9/93/2015-03-12-F2DB-R_pkg_lesson.pdf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/iDigBio/2015-03-09-workshop-field2db/gh-pages/r_pkg_lesson.R Recordings of the workshop: http://idigbio.adobeconnect.com/p9b106642l6/ http://idigbio.adobeconnect.com/p285w4uu5xr/ Matthew Collins Senior Systems Programmer Advanced Computing and Information Systems Lab, ECE University of Florida 352-392-5414 ________________________________________ From: Discuss <[email protected]> on behalf of Cam Macdonell <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2015 5:27 PM To: Andrew Francis Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Discuss] Suggestion for Software Carpentry Lesson: WebAPIs with Python, Requests and cURL Hi Andrew, It's a good suggestion. I teach web apis in Python as part of introductory CS courses that I instruct at my University. I'd be happy to contribute. I think one key would be to get a sense of the one or two web apis that librarians would find most useful, or at least understand the utility of. Also, we could check what the Library Carpenters at the British Library have done towards this. Cam Quoting Andrew Francis <[email protected]>: > Hi: > > I am new to Software Carpentry. I attended the "R" workshop during Pycon > 2014. Some friends attended "The > > Software Carpentry for Librarians" bootcamp. I looked at the covered lessons > and I noticed there was not anything about > > accessing web services. Especially in the case of librarians, I was a bit > surprised by the lack of a lesson on web based APIs because > > folks like the OCLC offer stuff like WorldCat API. > > > If it does not exist, I would like to suggest a Software Carpentry Lesson on > WebAPIs. Some of the topics mentioned could be > > why web APIs, HTTP and ReST, the cURL utility and Python with the requests > library, JSON. XML and beautiful soap would be nice > > too. > > > I am not a Software Carpentry instructor. However I have given Pycon talks > and I think I could prototype a lesson. Not sure how > > I would go about that though. > > > Cheers, > > Andrew > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
