The Scoop

  • Home
  • Projects
  • About The Scoop
  • Fixing Journalism
  • Medill Links
  • Departments
    • Apple
    • Asides
    • Broadcast
    • Campaign Finance
    • Car Tools
    • Data
    • DIY
    • django
    • Fed Data
    • FOIA
    • General
    • IRE
    • Journalism
    • Local Data
    • Mapping
    • Miscellany
    • NonGov Data
    • Online
    • Paper Trail
    • Presentations
    • Public Records
    • Python
    • Rails
    • SLA
    • Social Network Analysis
    • Sports
    • State Data
    • Teaching
    • Work
    • XML
  • Subscribe via RSS

Announcing Python-NYTCongressAPI

March 1st, 2009  |  Published in Python  |  3 Comments

So we’ve got this Congress API at The Times, which already has spawned a Ruby shell by Patrick Ewing (a shell being a really neat idea, as well as useful in building apps). I decided to try and get my feet wet with writing a Python library to interact with the API, too, and the initial result is now on Github.

It’s very basic, and owes much to the example put forth by James Turk’s python wrapper for the Sunlight API. At the suggestion of Sean Gillies, I’ve made the calls more in the style of Django’s ORM by using get() and filter() functions. So far, I’ve got functions for members and roll call votes, and I’ll be adding committees soon. Please feel free to fork the code or send suggestions my way.

Responses

Feed Trackback Address
  1. Peter Harkins says:

    March 1st, 2009 at 10:58 pm (#)

    Looking real good, I think it’s great that the NYT is building libraries.

    How’re you liking git? I switched all my personal and Barking Stapler projects over to it a few months ago. I used git-svn at the Post so that I could have feature branches. I’m a big fan. Anyone haze you with a tutorial all about directed acyclic graphs?

  2. Derek says:

    March 2nd, 2009 at 11:04 am (#)

    We use svn at work, but I really like git, particularly the ease of merging forked branches back into the master. No DAG tutorials just yet, either. Congrats on ListLibrary!

  3. raman says:

    March 2nd, 2009 at 12:38 pm (#)

    Thanks for creating this! I had a few minutes last Friday and started writing python scripts for the API–this library is a great help.

Leave a Response

Recent Comments

  • Derek on 2010 CAR Conference
  • Michal Migurski on 2010 CAR Conference
  • Walt Matchim on Installing Instiki on Windows
  • Tyrone on Outsourcing Database Development, or the Caspio Issue
  • Danny Sanchez on Lightning Talks at NICAR

Recent Posts

  • 2010 CAR Conference
  • A Gentle Introduction to Google App Engine
  • Lightning Talks at NICAR
  • Fumblerooski and Raw SQL in Django
  • Using Geocoders with GeoDjango


©2010 The Scoop
Powered by WordPress using the Gridline Lite theme by Graph Paper Press.