Community Data Science Course (Spring 2023)/Week 5 lecture notes

New concepts for the day:

• Defining functions
• import json and json.loads() and json.dumps()
• Reading from files
• Breaking projects in multiple notebooks and step
• Waiting... time.sleep(1)

Stage 0: Coming up with a plan

I want to download data on page views data for three universities and present the sum total of each.

I'm going to split work into two steps:

• collect the data from the web and write the raw JSON "payload" a file
• read the data from the file and do whatever data extraction, cleaning, counting, etc; then write a TSV file
• open a TSV file and make a graph

Stage 1: Getting data

I want to build data on how popular something is using the MediaWiki views API. First I went searching I found two places:

• MediaWiki API
• Wikimedia Rest API

I chose the second option.

The documentation suggested I should set up a unique user-agent. Search how todo that brought me to this StackOverflow post: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10606133/sending-user-agent-using-requests-library-in-python which I followed to set up headers appropriately.

Between that and the interactive material in Wikimedia Rest API, I was able to construct a URL.

We will build up something like file 1, version 1:

• setting the header
• json.dumps() [mention that I'll skip this until we have an error]

Stage 2: Reading in data

walk through building file 2, version 1 with a focus on:

• opening files with open(filename, 'r')
• f.read() which reads the whole file in
• json.loads()
• outputting days and views
• try to graph... we'll have an error when we try to graph
• write some new code to create better formatted date strings...

Stages 3 and 4: lets extend to multiple things

• lets build a couple functions. maybe one for dates? maybe one for getting_pageview data? lets refactor the old code to use these?
• lets build in waiting for a second with time.sleep(1)
• let's count with a dictionary