This weekend I was at a workshop on Application Programming Interfaces for the Digital Humanities. See the philosophi.ca wiki conference report.
The workshop looked at the possibilities and issues around APIs for digital humanities resources. I think it is fair to say that lots of projects have been exposing APIs but they aren’t being used much. We need to encourage projects to develop mashups that take advantage of the APIs.
This workshop, more than any other I’ve been at was heavily twittered (#apiworkshop) which was interesting and annoying. At times people seemed to space out and not participate as they rushed to document what was happening or contribute some bon mot. I should admit that I am part of the problem – I posted a few and was writing my conference report live which was just as distracting. I guess we all have develop an etiquette for situations where you are not just part of an audience, but are expected to participate.