The New York Times APIs offer access to a wealth of indexed information, both historical and current. However, much of that information is not readily available through The New York Times website, except by doing a search. The goal of this final project was to create an application, using The New York Times APIs, HTML5, and JavaScript, that takes advantage of some of this otherwise un(der)used information to address information needs in some domain. Students were asked to form four-person teams for the assignment, and use at least one of the APIs besides the Article Search API. The following projects were presented on Dec 9, 2014.
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Stars. Stars is an intuitive web application that provides users the ability to easily read numerous movie reviews and related articles for any movie. Users can query any movie title and Stars will return specific movie information such as a synopsis, trailers, reviews, and ratings. Stars also provides high definition trailers, which are embedded into the page. Users can check out the most popular movies, Critics' Picks and add any movie they are interested in to a watchlist. (Alfred Tan, Tommy Inouye, Roshen Weliwatta, and Sankalpa Khadka) |
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Popcorn.Popcorn is an app that allows the user to look up movie reviews based on how they've been rated by New York Times movie critics. The app takes advantage of the New York Times Movie Reviews API and also utilizes the Rotten Tomatoes API and the IMDB API. A user can search for a movie by search term, critic, opening date, or whether the movie is listed as a "critic pick" or "top 1000 best movies of all time." From the search results, a user can select a movie, and a pop-up will appear with movie information, reviews, and links to related material. The user can favorite movies by clicking on the yellow star in the pop-up, and the favorites will persist past the session in the Bookmarks tab. (Ariana Giorgi, Mei-Vern Then, Sandya Sankarram, and Serena Simkus) |
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Congress Tracker. Whether a user wants to learn more about their current member of Congress right before a general election, or a user is a political enthusiast with aspirations to serve in Congress someday, Congress Tracker uses the New York Times APIs to provide information about current members of the United States Congress. After searching for a specific member of Congress by state, chamber, and either district (House) or senator (Senate), users get access to the member's biographical and campaign finance information, voting record, introduced bills, and recent news articles about the member. Users can then "favorite" a Congress member for easy access to these details in the future. (Connor Claflin, Brendon Fish, Jason Lee, Wanjun Li, and Lindsay Neubauer) |
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BookWorm. BookWorm is meant for book lovers who want planned and organized reading goals, either for themselves or for others. It can also serve as a means of documenting books a user has already read for his or her own reference. Bookwarm allows you to choose a book category, view the bestselling books in that category from The New York Times, as well as related information about this book retrieved from The New York Times. BookWorm also provides an interface to add these books to your list and to edit the current list. You would be able to view and edit lists you created in the past as well. (Ami Kumar, Jianqiao Li, Tianyi Ren and Yu Zheng) |
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NoComment. NoComment provides a simple and elegant way to view congressional data and learn about political leaders throughout the United States. Utilizing an interactive D3.js map as well as the New York Times Congress and Article APIs, the application makes it easy to read up on individual senators, representatives, and the bills they have recently sponsored. (Alex Kalicki, Lilly Wang, Gwen Pfetsch, and Gemma Ragozzine) |
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Book Bags. Book Bags enables users to create custom groupings of books ("Book Bags"), which the app analyzes in order to recommend other books the user might enjoy. The app gets smarter over time, as the user adds books to Book Bags or marks them "not interested," in order to provide the best possible recommendations. Listings of current NYT Bestsellers are featured on the user's dashboard as a launching point for creating Book Bags, and NYT Bestsellers are highlighted among the recommended books. (Lauren Zou, Tom Segarra, Sarah Green, and Kristie Howard) |
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Movie Raider. Movie Raider enables you to find information about movies and helps you plan a cinema day by showing you all theaters playing the movies you are interested in. Movie background, ratings and reviews are provided by the New York Times and Rotten Tomatoes APIs. You can browse most popular movies currently in theaters, search for a particular title and pick one or more movies you are interested in, to add them to your selection. Based on the selected movies and your location and date preference, our application shows you all theaters matching these criteria. (Aiden Yang, Boyu Wang, Yanrong Wo, and Zissis Konstas) |
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WhatUpNYC. WhatsUpNYC is a website designed to help New Yorkers and tourists visiting New York to find out the events happening in New York. Tourists can plan their trip to New York and make the best of the city by attending as many happening events as they possibly can during their trip based on their interests and genre of events. They could rate the events after attending them or choose events based on the ratings of other users. To select events, they can pin them and easily reference them at a later stage. New Yorkers can do the same, and in turn help visitors in selecting the right events through their ratings. (Chaitanya Korgaonkar, Devashi Tandon, Shrutika Dasgupta, and Swikriti Jain) |
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District 12. In a city with an endless selection of events to choose from, District 12 is an application that provides users the tools to easily keep track of their interests. From the newest eye-catching gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to the upcoming Jazz performance at your favorite downtown restaurant, to the dance show in midtown that everyone's talking about, you'll be able to read up on the upcoming events in New York City and plan accordingly using District 12. Select a category (e.g., Movies, Theater, or Art) and you'll be provided a full listing of related events being offered in the city. You also have the option of searching by keyword, by proximity, or even clicking an event to read its full description provided by The New York Times. Close to deciding but want some more information? Use the related articles function on a given event to see what articles might have covered it! Lastly, add any event you choose to the included calendar to keep things organized. With District 12, the city is yours. (Fei-Tzin Lee, Daniel Newman, Martin Ong, Jon Paul, and Jee Hyun Wang) |
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CongressionalTweets. Congress has demonstrated in recent years that it has a lot of problems. Young people often get a bad rap for being politically apathetic and not holding Congress accountable. It's true that we don't pick up the phone to call our representatives. And we don't stay informed by picking up the newspaper or watching the evening news. Instead, we turn to our smartphones for real-time snippets of truth on Twitter and Facebook. We tweet at and message people and broadcast our opinions on social media. To its credit, the United States Congress is trying to move into the 21st century. Almost all members are active on Twitter. Moreover, the New York Times is still a trusted name in news and it makes available a vast trove of information about each member of Congress via the Congress API. What if this information could be combined in a simple, mobile-friendly web application that featured a familiar, Twitter-ish interface? That's CongressionalTweets. It facilitates Twitter conversations between members of Congress and young constituents armed with information, such as a particular politician's voting record and which bills he or she has sponsored. (Nancy Thorton and Alfred Miller) |