I recently joined a university effort to build a new, interdisciplinary PhD program in Applied Analytics. The team consists of faculty from medicine, health, nursing, education, physics, engineering, and me, from psychology. The experience has been mostly very positive; it’s a chance to learn about what scholars from other disciplines think about I-O and how we can work together to build something.  It makes me wonder why this sort of collaboration isn’t more common at my university. I imagine it isn’t very common in most settings.  I wonder, too, about whether this thing we are building is better than any of us or in fact worse than any of us.  By compromising with others, do we lose all the valuable bits of our own approach?

This issue, we’ll be building on the ideas in my Crash Course on the Internet to understand two concepts that are very similar in purpose but very different in execution: web scraping and application programming interfaces (APIs).  If you haven’t read the Internet article yet, I recommend you do so first, or some of the concepts I talk about here will not make a whole lot of sense.  Both approaches concern harvesting data from the internet algorithmically, but they are used in different circumstances.

Editor's Note: This column explores an issue that may seem superficial on its face. Yet, for many, the issue of how to dress at work comes with layers of economic, social, racial, religious, and gender context that make it a difficult and stressful decision. The I-Opener columnists do a good job of acknowledging that their perspective is limited to their own experience. I encourage you to share your own experiences as well.