Ovid as a Service

This API provides programmatic access to Ovid's The Metamorphoses.

Description

Ovid as a Service provides secure endpoints for:

• Full text search
• Entire books and chapters by number
• Random line, chapter, and book

The full text was scraped and cleaned from UVA's Ovid Project using BeautifulSoup and spacy. It is indexed line-by-line in a local Whoosh instance. The API was developed in the FastAPI framework. The whole thing is Dockerized and served from a free EC2 instance.

Endpoints

Base URL

• https://api.ovidasaservice.com

full_text

• v1/full_text?query={str}
  Returns all lines matching your query sorted in their original order

chapter

• v1/chapter?query={str}
  Returns all chapters with titles matching str value

book

• v1/book/int
• Note: book can also accept optional text and chapter query params to search for text and/or chapter number within a book v1/book/{int}?query={str}&chapter={int}

random

• v1/random/{resource}
resource param can be one of the following values: line, chapter, or book

Example

book endpoint:

curl -X GET 'https://api.ovidasaservice.com/v1/book/1?query=io&chapter=24'

Returns:

{"count":9,"results":[{"book":"1","chapter":"24","chapter_name":"Inachus mourns for Io","line":"247","text":"There is a grove in Haemonia, closed in on every side by wooded cliffs."}...],"credits":"This A.S. Kline translation of Ovid's The Metamorphoses was scraped from University of Virginia Library's Ovid Collection. See more: https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/about.html. Labor ipse voluptas."}

random endpoint:

curl -X GET 'https://api.ovidasaservice.com/v1/random/line'

Returns:

{"count":1,"results":[{"book":"2","chapter":"33","chapter_name":"Aglauros is turned to stone","line":"763","text":"Nor was she white stone:"}],"credits":"This A.S. Kline translation of Ovid's The Metamorphoses was scraped from University of Virginia Library's Ovid Collection. See more: https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/about.html. Labor ipse voluptas."}

Authors and acknowledgements

• tal.noznisky@gmail.com
• University of Virginia Library Ovid Collection - thank you for the transcription!
• A.L. Kline trans. of Ovid's The Metamorphoses

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details