📍 Hybrid Event: MZES, Mannheim + Zoom
📆 September 21, 2022
Application Programming Interfaces, short APIs, are a technology that includes a set of tools allowing users to send and receive data or functionality through a documented interface. Nowadays, not only developers but also social scientists make use of APIs where typical use cases consist of systematically querying data that are made available by the API. On this occasion, we want to introduce the website "APIs for social scientists: A collaborative review" (Bauer, Landesvatter and Behrens, 2022) which is a collection of examples of different APIs alongside social science examples. The roundtable will be structured into two parts. First, the current editors of the collaborative review introduce the review and its chapter in more general terms. Second, together with our panelists who have authored several chapters in the review, we will discuss various questions surrounding APIs. This includes use cases, opportunities as well as limitations that APIs bring for social science research questions.
GitHub Repository: APIs for Social Scientists: A collaborative review
📝 Slides
👤 Camille Landesvatter is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Mannheim and research associate at the MZES. Her research includes generalized trust and social cohesion for which she draws on methods including survey experiments and text classification. Camille co-founded the API review, is author of multiple chapters and current editor.
👤 Paul C. Bauer is a postdoctoral fellow at the MZES and previous postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute. His current research focuses on social and political trust as well as polarization for which he draws on experimental methods and a focus on causal inference, text data and data visualization. The API review is only one of many projects he uses to teach topics of computational social science. Paul is the founder of the API review, contributed multiple chapters and is current editor.
👤 Lion Behrens is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences (GESS) at the University of Mannheim and a research associate at the Chair of Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences. His research includes topics of electoral fraud and legislative behavior alongside statistical modeling. Lion contributed a chapter on the CrowdTangle API to the API review and is current editor.
👤 Chung-hong Chan is a postdoctoral fellow at the MZES. His research includes the role of media in conflicts and platform interventions with a further focus on text analysis. Hong is author of multiple chapters in the API review (Mediacloud API, Twitter API) and also provided many other contributions and supervision to the overall project such as a chapter on best practices in using APIs.
👤 Marie-Lou Sohnius is a graduate student of political science at the University of Mannheim. This autumn she will start her PhD in Political Science in Oxford where she will work on topics related to elections and public opinion, with a focus on non-citizen voting rights. In the API review she is author of the chapter on the Spotify API.
👤 Domantas Undzėnas is a graduate student at the University of Mannheim. This autumn he will start his PhD in political science at the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences (GESS). His research focuses on political behaviour, especially individual-level authoritarianism and social dominance. In the API review he is author of the chapter on the Reddit API.
👤 Lukas Isermann is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences (GESS) at the University of Mannheim and a research associate at the MZES. His areas of research include issue competition and political behavior. Lukas contributed multiple chapters to the API review, namely the Google Places API and the Internet Archive Wayback API.