API Interaction: A Vignette
Claudia Donahue 2022-06-26
The Vignette Assignment
Our class was assigned to choose an API from a list and create a vignette, demonstrating to a user how to interact with that API. I initially chose the Pokemon API but had very limited success working with it and switched after a couple (wasted?) days. I ended up using a COVID-19 data API.
I created a bunch of functions which allow a user to interact with the API and select options, like a country or timeline of interest. The user then gets a dataframe or a graph, depending which function. Then I explored the data further, using techniques we have been learning this term.
Reflections
I found that I was left with a lot of questions. It was interesting to note that the United States has a much higher confirmed case count than any other country, but I wondered about record keeping and reporting. The same with the numbers of deaths. I also learned that a lot of the compelling data is behind a subscription fee, as I wished I had access to population and GDP data within the API, but I did not want to pay for it and did not have an excess of time to figure out how to match it up.
I had trouble with this data set because it was not easy to categorize and explore the data the way we have been in other assignments. I had to add a new variable so that I had some interesting categories to compare across. Still, it was better than the Pokemon API, where I could not make a function return a decent dataframe in a reasonable amount of working time.
I am happy to be getting more comfortable using github for version control. Here is a link to my repository for this project.
Next time
Next time I have a project like this, I like to think I will start earlier and ask for help (probably) to make sure I can properly use the data I want to use (Pokemon – to get my kids interested in data science). I also probably will not choose an API just based on whether I have to sign up for my own key. Who knows–I might even pay my own money for access to an API one day!
Last thing
Here is the link to my github pages repo for this project. I made it public on the due date for the project, as directed.