/softdes-nytimes-countries

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softdes-nytimes-countries

These files focus on looking at how the New York Times covers regime changes related to U.S. intervention and influence. The full report can be found in ComputationalEssay.ipynb.

obtaining.py has functions that can be used to obtain data about the number of keyword hits and headlines each month from New York Times Article Search API; it can also write them to a cvs.

processing.py has functions that read a csv and formats headlines, both for word cloud generation and for using Google's Natural Language API.

visualization.py contains functions that can generate various plots from a csv.

Collected data for each country is stored in a csv in CountryData with corresponding flags in CountryFlags.

Requirements Before Running

To use the all functions, you must do all of the following:

  1. Install pyjq library to use processing.py and obtaining.py.
    • Make sure that it can build the wheel: python -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel
    • Make sure that you have all of the following packages: flex, bison, libtool, make, automake, and autoconfig. These can be installed with sudo apt install <package>.
    • Install pyjq: pip install pyjq
  2. Make a New York Times Developer account and create an API key that can access the Article Search API.
    • This key as a string should be used as an input to any function in obtaining.py that calls for an API key.
  3. Make a free Google Cloud account and make an API key that can access the Natural Language API. These steps are necessary to use processing.py.
    • In processing.py, uncomment line 10 (import os). Uncomment lines 21 and 22 as well.
    • In processing.py on line 19, add a variable PATH_<YOUR NAME> that has a string for your path to your Google Cloud API key in the first line of a text file.
    • Change line 21 to use your API variable: with open(os.path.abspath(PATH_<YOUR_NAME>), "r") as f:.
  4. If running a code block in computational essay, make sure to uncomment any lines of code as well as read directions for adding API keys.

Generating Plots

You should not need to do anything besides run the computational essay to generate plots. The plot generating functions can be found in visualization.py. If you would like to create a new plot, check the docstrings for specifics.