What is an API? An API is an Application Programming Interface. This interface is a platform where different people or computer programs can interact with content. An interface has to have reproduceable data, which basically means an API saves another scholar from having to make the dataset from scratch. This is essentially a set of rules or protocols on how to use the data displayed here. The API present here allows you to parse the data that we have created the visualizations on the site with, you can filter it to your heart’s desire. Explore the Melville Letters and Hamilton Letters datasets. The datasets are freely available as both CSV and API.
To use the API, filter by sender, recipient, date, or keywords, then download your results as a CSV.
While the API offers an "open data" approach and allows for the retrieval of data, if you want the bulk data either filtered or not you can find these in our GitHub Repository. We have four main end points as listed above and the JSON allows for multiple interactions with the data.