Connecting the dots…
The idea was to put together a workflow connecting all the cloud services we looked at during these days, basically: Integromat, API, Datawrapper, iOS notifications and Google Sheets.
The first step was decide where to get the data. Instead of using a museum collection (i.e. Rijksmuseum), I was attracted by the idea of having my own data
In order to get the data, instead of using an existing API from a museum collection (i.e. Rijksmuseum) I decided to create my own end point. The idea was to create a testing environment to then translate the configuration to a production site (i.e. the online catalogue https://colabora.andaluciayamerica.com/catalogo).
I prepared the demo website in Drupal, a CMS I am used to work with, with a basic data model for artworks, fake content produced with the Devel module, and the Services module to generate the REST Server.
The public endpoint is accessible in JSON format at http://dahss2020.mato.webfactional.com/api/catalogue/v1/collection
The second step involved extracting data from the website using the API and write it to a Google Sheet. In order to do that I created a “scenario” in Integromat, using the following services: HTTP, Router, Apple iOS, Iterator and Google Sheets.
This workflow involves getting the data from the API with a HTTP request, iteratively import data into a Google Sheet and sending a notification to my phone about new data imported.
Fields written to the Google sheet are: ID, Title, Typology, Author, Image URI, Chronology, Creation date.
This data is then processed in Google Sheet via a pivot table, in order to quantify, for example, the number of artworks per authors. The resulting table is loaded into Datawrapper to display an interactive chart, embeddable on the web.
Some very short consideration
The most interesting part of the track for me was to familiarize with API, JSON and REST services. The next challenge on this front will be for me to implement a public (and maybe useful) API in a production environment (candidates are https://colabora.andaluciayamerica.com/catalogo and https://historicgraves.com).
Integromat proved to be a useful service to create proof-of-concept workflows, but it has limitation given by is business model (1000 requests per month for free).
The most frustrating tool for me was Datawrapper, but I guess it is also because I spent very little time with it. Shortcoming are that it cannot manipulate data, only visualize them and, most important, charts do not update even if the background data change 🙁