For many high school teachers here in New Zealand, the teaching year is over and it’s now a six-week summer break before school starts again next year. Despite the well-deserved break, some teachers are already thinking about ideas for next year. I’ve been amazed (and inspired) by the teachers who have signed up to spend a day with Liza and I on Friday 15th December to learn more about working with modern data (more details here). We are both really looking forward to the full-day workshop 🙂 One of the tools we’ll be working with at the workshop is the platform IFTTT (If This Then That). It’s basically a way to connect devices and online accounts using APIs (application programming interfaces) without using code.

I used IFTTT recently to collect data on New York Times articles. One of the reasons why I started collecting data on New York Times articles was because of their free, online feature “What’s Going On in This Graph?”. On Tuesday, December 12 and every second Tuesday of the month through the US school year, The New York Times Learning Network, in partnership with the American Statistical Association, hosts a live online discussion about a timely graph like the one shown below.

One of the super interesting graphs featured

Students from around the world “read” the graph by posting comments about what they notice and wonder in an online forum.  Teachers live-moderates by responding to the comments in real time and encouraging students to go deeper.  All releases are archived so that teachers can use previous graphs anytime (read this introductory post to learn more). I used “What’s Going On in This Graph?” when I was teaching our Lies, Damned lies and Statistics course, and it is such an awesome resource for helping build statistical literacy and thinking.

So, inspired by the New York Times graphs, about two months ago I created an “applet” on IFTTT that creates a new row in a Google spreadsheet every time a new article is posted to the New York Times website. It stopped working for some reason at the end of November – check out the “raw” data here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PXGh0xBrJbmrfWq3nRylH5GBqzVd4SYWWiXQj3v9tdQ/edit?usp=sharing 

So what’s going on with the data I collected? Your first thought on viewing the data might be – huh? You call this data? The only variable that is “graph ready” is which section each of the nearly 6000 articles were published in. But there are so many variables in data sets just like this one waiting to be defined and explored. After our workshop on Friday, I’ll post an “after” version of this same data set 🙂