Design Process

My design process began with an hour of searching through API's from apilist.fun. My criteria for choosing an api included the following constraints:

• Free
• Easy-to-use
• Related to current events

I ended up going with the New York Times API, influenced by my history with the prior relationship with the newspaper company.

From there, I wanted to form some dialog around the information provided by the Times. In today's world, there's a trust issue between the public and the media.

People feel certain ways towards the news, but can we quantify the sentiment of the news?

Sketches and API Sources

I'm currently using the New York Times API, specifically the Article Search api and the Top Stories api.

Description

This project is a Sentiment Analysis Tool for the New York Times. The app supports both top stories for the day, as well as search functionality.

For the sketch, I used AFINN sentiment analysis. I based my code heavily off of this functional JS implementation tutorial.

Reflections

Adherence to Feminist Data Principles

Principle 1: Examine power

Media outlets like the New York Times both hold an immense amount of power, while also examining forms of influence and power in society. A sentiment analysis of this examination, and the outlet itself, is another way to examine power.

Principle 3: Elevate emotion and embodiment

Sentiment is heavily tied to emotion. Senitment analysis is an expression of knowledge, and provides a technological, and imperfect form of analysis of human emotion.

Principle 6: Consider context

More than anything, this project is a tool to provide more context as to specific articles' sentiment, as well as sentiment in articles for a specified topic or context as a whole.

Recontextualization

At the end of the day, this sketch is a prototype and a tool to help with browsing the New York Times.

This project provides another layer, a sentiment layer, of context over the New York Times api.