Partially Attended

an irregularly updated blog by Ian Mulvany

Using Datasette to publish data

Thu Jul 2, 2020

184 Words

In my department we have started to make a bit of space to allow for self learning to happen. I took the time to look at https://datasette.readthedocs.io/en/stable/, an ecosystem of tools that support data publishing. These tools are from Simon Willison, and they are fantastic.

I’d been meaning to look at the them for some time now. I used a jupyter notebook to work my way around getting some data together, and working with the tool.

In the notebook I:

  • get some data about 100 BMJ articles using the crossref API
  • take a selection of the metadata from those articles
  • install Datasette locally
  • use sqlite_utils to create a local sqlite database
  • use datasette running locally to explore and interact with this data
  • export to CSV from my local instance
  • upload this CSV to an online instance of Datasette running on Glitch
  • configure the Glitch instance to enable full text search on some of the fields

The final output can be seen running at https://watery-alder-carpenter.glitch.me/data/article.

Overall it went really well, and I’m excited about Datasette.

You can grab a copy of this notebook from https://github.com/IanMulvany/datasette-testing-bmj-articles.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License