Assignment - Web APIs

The New York Times web site provides a rich set of APIs, as described here: https://developer.nytimes.com/apis You’ll need to start by signing up for an API key. Your task is to choose one of the New York Times APIs, construct an interface in R to read in the JSON data, and transform it into an R DataFrame:

library(tidyverse)
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library(httr)
library(jsonlite)
## 
## Attaching package: 'jsonlite'
## 
## The following object is masked from 'package:purrr':
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##     flatten
library(dotenv)
#load the api key in .env file
load_dot_env()
api_key <- Sys.getenv("api_key")
#set period separately to make it easy to adjust
period <- 7

url <- sprintf("https://api.nytimes.com/svc/mostpopular/v2/viewed/%d.json", period)

response <- GET(url, query = list(`api-key` = api_key))

#check status
if (http_status(response)$category == "Success") {
  # Parse the JSON content
  data <- content(response, "text") %>%
    fromJSON(flatten = TRUE)
} else {
  #print error
  stop("Error: Unable to retrieve data from the API.")
}
#convert to dataframe
df <- as.data.frame(data)

Analyses

I had some basic questions I wanted to collect from the list of most viewed articles I collected. I asked and plotted their answers.

#plot the NYT section the top 20 articles appear in
ggplot(df, aes(x = results.section)) +
  geom_bar(fill = "skyblue", color = "black") +
  labs(title = "Frequency of Sections", x = "Section", y = "Frequency") +
  theme_minimal() +
  coord_flip()

#plot the frequency of specific keywords
df <- df %>%
  mutate(keyword_appearance = grepl("Gaza|Israel", results.adx_keywords, ignore.case = TRUE))

#create a barplot of the frequency of rows with 'Gaza' or 'Israel' in the keywords
ggplot(df, aes(x = factor(keyword_appearance), fill = factor(keyword_appearance))) +
  geom_bar() +
  labs(title = "Frequency of 'Gaza' or 'Israel' in Keywords", x = "Israel/Gaza", y = "Frequency") +
  scale_x_discrete(labels = c("Does Not Appear", "Appears")) +
  scale_fill_manual(values = c("gray", "blue")) +  # Adjust the colors as needed
  theme_minimal() +
  guides(fill = FALSE)
## Warning: The `<scale>` argument of `guides()` cannot be `FALSE`. Use "none" instead as
## of ggplot2 3.3.4.
## This warning is displayed once every 8 hours.
## Call `lifecycle::last_lifecycle_warnings()` to see where this warning was
## generated.