Sousveillance Tool

Description

Hover over cities to study their Air Quality Index (AQI) and the NYT articles the city feature in the headlines from the past year (2021).

Link to code here
This is a project to compare the current AQI data of five major US cities with all the New York Times articles in which these cities featured in the headlines from the past year (2021). My attempt is to find a correlation between the air quality or pollution in a city with the kinds of events the city features in news headlines for.

The 5 cities I have chosen are:
Boston, Massachusetts
NYC, New York
Los Angeles, California
Chicago, Illinois
Houston, texas

These cities are also among the most populated cities in the US.

Design Process

I chose two APIs for this project:
Air Visual – for finding a cities current AQI and New York Times – for searching for articles from the year 2021 where the city featured in the headlines. The website Air Visual also has an interactive visual interface for getting AQI data in different parts of the world. The interface is of a clickable live map and it gives a fair idea of the data the api provides.

Reflection

This assignment helped my understannd APIs and how to use them. I also got a fair understanding of using json objects and the httpGet() function in p5.js along with using its parameters. This assignment has surely opened new avenues for me for future data visualisation projects using live data in my areas of interest.

Credits

Sean's lab sessions were incredibly helpful for me in grasping this new project from scratch. Sean's one-on-one session with me helped me further fine tune my understanding of the concept of using APIs. Xin and Katherine's lecture and resources were also a source of help.

The AQI data and NYT articles are sourced from the Air Visual and NYT APIs, the links for which have been shared above, under my process documentation.