Data Unbound

I'm excited about the upcoming MITH API Workshop to be held in two weeks from Feb 25-26 at UMD :

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities will host a two-day workshop on developing APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for the digital humanities. The workshop will gather 40-50 digital humanities scholars and developers, who along with industry leaders will demonstrate their APIs during this “working weekend.” We will discuss ways that existing and future APIs could be leveraged for digital humanities projects.

As someone who has been fascinated by APIs for years, I hope to learn a lot from my fellow digital humanities about what they care about. One of my tasks is to give an introductory talk about APIs.  What do I want to cover?  I'm still working out the exact structure, but the following topics come to mind:

• What are APIs.  The relationship between web APIs (the focus of our workshop, I believe) and other APIs
• How to learn more about APIs
• APIs of specific interest to the digital humanities, with specific references to Freebase, Google geo-APIs, and OpenLibrary (organizations represented by fellow presenters)
• Why does REST matter. (I'll only anticipate what fellow speaker Peter Keane will be bring up in his talk about REST)
• How to consume APIs; What are mashups
• How to deploy APIs
• Open questions I think about

Stay tuned. Over the next two weeks, I'll work through these topics for myself (writing on this blog). I'll take this time as an opportunity to revisit what I wrote  in Pro Web 2.0 Mashups:  Remixing Data and Web Services and what I taught in my Mixing and Remixing Information course I taught at UC Berkeley over five years.