How to get bulk data from websites

Description

Led by Dr Paul Nulty
Many organisations provide access to data through Application Programming Interfaces which define the form of requests that computer programs should make to communicate with other computer programs. Web APIs, such as those provided by many social media platforms and government agencies, allow researchers to retrieve large amounts of data automatically by sending http requests and parsing the XML or JSON formatted data that is returned. In this session we will explain the concept of an API and work through several examples in python of retrieving data from the twitter and data.parliament.uk services. Some prior experience with python would help to follow along with the examples, but this is not necessary. 
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