Hacking for Historians
Session 2 - Breaking Down Code
Matthias Bannert** (@whatsgoodio) and Ina Serif++
ETH Zurich**, Uni Basel++
2019-09-25
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Take Aways from Session I
Why Code When You Can Click?
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Reproducibility
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Visualization
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Code as a Communication Channel
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Automation & Scaling
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Or in Other Words ...
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Breaking Down Code: General Advice
- 'Eat Cake First', i.e., run the code see what it does (unless you work in security)
- Read line by line
- Read lines from the inside out
- Understand scoping
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Breaking Down Code: A Minimal API Wrapper
- Go to github.com/mbannert/dh-2019/.... to see what we will be working on
Copy & Paste the code from the raw version to a new R file (to create a new file press CMD+Shift+N on a Mac / Ctrl+Shift+N on Win & Linux)
Select all the code in the new file and run the selection (Cmd+Enter on a Mac / Ctrl+Enter on Win & Linux)
What happens? Do you get errors? Can you make sense of the error messages?
Let's understand what we do here and break down the code.
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Task 1: Write Your Own Wrapper
This is the URL for the METs search endpoint: https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/public/collection/v1/search?q=
Write an own wrapper function called search_MET that
- a search character string as its only argument
- returns a vector of object ids as results
BONUS: Find / explain what the function should return in case there are no results found.
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