The New York Times this week announced the first of what it says will be many API datasets that it is making available to developers. The new API provides a way to access the total of donations over $200 to each candidate in the U.S. presidential election, including the primaries.
There are a lot of possibilities for slicing and dicing the Federal Election Commission data. In addition to totals for each candidate, the API makes state and zip code totals available, also sliced by candidate. Currently the data is through August. There will be two more updates before the election and a final tally in early December.
With the U.S. presidential election weeks away, this first API from The New York Times is well timed. The newspaper promises many more APIs in the future, including movie reviews, which is currently in the works.
Using the API requires a nytimes.com account and an API key, both of which are available for free.
This campaign has already had many new uses of technology and the web. We look forward to the mashups and other visualizations of this data that are sure to come in the next few weeks.
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