Interface to the Congress and Campaign Finance APIs from Propublica, and the Article Search and Geographic 'APIs' from the New York Times.
Functions that wrap these sets of APIs are prefixed by two letter
acronyms fo reach API endpoint + the function name itself as for example
cg + fxn
as - for the Article Search API (Docs: http://developer.nytimes.com/article_search_v2.json)
geo - for the Geographic API (Docs: http://developer.nytimes.com/geo_api_v2.json)
cg - for the Congress API (Docs: https://projects.propublica.org/api-docs/congress-api/)
cf - for the Campaign Finance API (Docs: https://propublica.github.io/campaign-finance-api-docs/)
See the vignette for help.
Get your own API keys for NYTimes APIs at http://developer.nytimes.com/signup - you'll need a different key for each of the article saerch and geo NYTimes APIs.
Get your Propublica API key for Congress and Campaign Finance APIs at either https://www.propublica.org/datastore/api/propublica-congress-api or https://www.propublica.org/datastore/api/campaign-finance-api - as far as I know, you can use the same key for both APIs
We set up the functions so that you can put the key in your .Renviron
file, which will be called on startup of R, and then you don't have to enter
your API key for each run of a function. Add entries for an R session like
Sys.setenv(NYTIMES_AS_KEY = "YOURKEYHERE")
Sys.setenv(NYTIMES_GEO_KEY = "YOURKEYHERE")
Sys.setenv(PROPUBLICA_API_KEY = "YOURKEYHERE")
Or set them across sessions by putting entries in your .Renviron file
like
NYTIMES_AS_KEY=<yourkey>
NYTIMES_GEO_KEY=<yourkey>
PROPUBLICA_API_KEY=<yourkey>
You can also pass in your key in a function call, but be careful not to
expose your keys in code committed to public repositories. If you do pass
in a function call, use e.g., Sys.getenv("NYTIMES_AS_KEY")
Rate limits vary for the different APIs:
Article Search API: 1/sec, 1,000/day
Geographic API: 5/sec, 1,000/day
Congress API: 2/sec, 5,000/day
Campaign Finance API: 50/sec, 5,000/day
Backstory is that the Congress and Campaign finance APIs used to be part of NYTimes, but were taken over by Propublica.