In rtimes: Client for New York Times 'APIs'

Use case - Civil Rights Coverage in NYT over time

This is an example use of rtimes from Gaurav Soodoku. Find the original code at GitHub.

This example is a smaller subset of the analysis in the original code, just looking at one phrase: Affirmative Action

Installation

install.packages("rtimes")

library("rtimes")

Authentication

First, get an API key for the Article Search API at developer.nytimes.com/apps/register. Then set the key in R:

Sys.setenv(NYTIMES_AS_KEY = '<your api key>')

Query the NYTimes Article Search API

Set dates. Here, one query per year from 1881 to 1985

dates <- format(seq(as.Date("1880/1/1"), as.Date("2000/1/1"), by = "5 years"), "%Y%m%d")

Make a data.frame to put data in to

results <- data.frame(startDate = NA, endDate = NA, afam = NA)

Loop through dates

for (i in seq_len(length(dates) - 1)) {
  Sys.sleep(1)
  counts <- NA
  counts <- as_search(q = "affirmative action",
                      begin_date = dates[i],
                      end_date = dates[i + 1])$meta$hits[1]
  results[i, ] <- c(dates[i], dates[i + 1], counts)
}

Plot results

Load packages

library("lubridate")
library("ggplot2")
library("scales")
library("grid")

Convert dates to class date

results$startDate <- as.Date(as.character(results$startDate), format = "%Y%m%d")
results$afam <- as.numeric(results$afam)

Plot mentions of Affirmative Action

ggplot(results, aes(x = startDate, y = afam)) +
  geom_point(size = 1, color = "#42C4C7") +
  geom_smooth(method = "gam", formula = y ~ s(x), aes(group = 1),
              size = 1, colour = "#777777", alpha = 0.05, se = FALSE) +
  ylab("No. Articles Containing the phrase 'Affirmative Action'") +
  xlab("Year") +
  scale_x_date(breaks = pretty_breaks(n = 10)) +
  theme_grey(base_size = 18)