Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

February 17, 2018

Working with The New York Times API in R

Filed under: Journalism,News,R,Reporting — Patrick Durusau @ 8:49 pm

Working with The New York Times API in R by Jonathan D. Fitzgerald.

From the post:

Have you ever come across a resource that you didn’t know existed, but once you find it you wonder how you ever got along without it? I had this feeling earlier this week when I came across the New York Times API. That’s right, the paper of record allows you–with a little bit of programming skills–to query their entire archive and work with the data. Well, it’s important to note that we don’t get the full text of articles, but we do get a lot of metadata and URLs for each of the articles, which means it’s not impossible to get the full text. But still, this is pretty cool.

So, let’s get started! You’re going to want to head over to http://developer.nytimes.com to get an API Key. While you’re there, check out the selection of APIs on offer–there are over 10, including Article Search, Archive, Books, Comments, Movie Reviews, Top Stories, and more. I’m still digging into each of these myself, so today we’ll focus on Article Search, and I suspect I’ll revisit the NYT API in this space many times going forward. Also at NYT’s developer site, you can use their API Tool feature to try out some queries without writing code. I found this helpful for wrapping my head around the APIs.

A great “getting your feet wet” introduction to the New York Times API in R.

Caution: The line between the New York Times (NYT) and governments is a blurry one. It has cooperated with governments in the past and will do so in the future. If you are betrayed by the NYT, you have no one but yourself to blame.

The same is true for the content of the NYT, past or present. Chance is not the deciding factor on stories being reported in the NYT. It won’t be possible to discern motives in the vast majority of cases but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. Treat the “historical” record as carefully as current accounts based on “reliable sources.”

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