AdamMatthewTry

Try using the API for data mining with Adam Matthew Digital databases (requires subscription to AM Digital)

First attempt will use Python.

Requires

• A subscription to Adam Matthew Digital products such as Mass Observation
• An API key for their data mining features

To run:

• Download these files to your computer.
• Edit read_test.py and replace the apiKey value from XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX to the correct value.
  • The image above shows Notepad. A better text editor to use is Notepad++.
• If you are familiar with using the command line, change to this directory and call python read_test.py
• If not, and you are using Windows:

Open Explorer at the AdamMatthewTry directory.

In the white space in the middle of the window (below the list of file names), hold Shift and right-click, choose Open command window here.

In the command window, type python read_test.py and press Enter.

The returned JSON code will show in the command window. There will be a u character before each string (piece of text), meaning that the text is Unicode not ASCII -- this will become important later.

Going further

• You can edit the URL as per the Adam Matthew API documentation to get more, desirable responses.
• You can find better ways to use the reponses, such as exporting to CSV.
  • You can do this by uncommenting the last five lines in the script, i.e. deleting the # symbol from the start of those lines (from import csv onwards), then running again.
  • A new output file will be created mycsvfile.csv which can be opened in Excel.
• You can extend the Python script to do other things such as retrieve the full-text for multiple items, store the text to a local database (your own new corpus), then perform analysis on the corpus.