Research Associate, Network Analysis, Social Media and Programming
As I’ve mentioned in many of my blog posts before this one, Mastodon has a publicly available API which can be used to scrape statuses, collect hashtags and much more. One feature that I have yet to mention in this blog is the ability to stream statuses as Mastodon features a streaming API for processing … Read more
Over the past few months, Mastodon, the Federated microblogging alternative to Twitter, has gained a lot of attraction in light of the events going on surrounding Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Upon further inspection, it turns out most instances have a public facing REST API for allowing users to interact with their services using third-party … Read more
An essential skill for any web scraper or data scientist is to know how to collect information from a publicly available REST API. In short, a REST API is a very simple web service where simple HTTP requests (just like a web browser) are used to collect data usually in the form of a JSON … Read more
Python is known for being able to do many different things due to the versatility of the programming language. One thing Python is particularly well-known for is its ability to receive data over the Web using the requests package (more information can be found here). The requests package enables users to perform basic HTTP requests … Read more