Sorry for the delays. After some consternation about what to do with the TimesWire API, I determined my best approach would be to construct a wrapper and built out some basic tools for my use with it. As I went about this process, one thing that I kept coming back to was the ‘Section’ field for each article. As I worked throughout the night, I saw that over time, different sections were dominating the last 20 responses I was pulling (this is before I found out in class that we could pull results over a longer period of time). My prototype and mockup both deal with the of being able to track which section of the paper was currently submitting the most articles, as a way to get a sense of the ebb and flow of the production schedules of each section. I thought this would provide an interesting look at a hidden side of The Times, and I may pursue it further just to see what the actual results are like. My second idea which I unfortunately could not find a meaningful way to produce was the idea of an article-generated game as a way to combine the growing popularity of casual (especially mobile) games and a desire to have them be educational.
Here’s a screenshot and link to my SWF that returns back The Times section with the highest frequency of articles within the last 20:
[ SWF ]
Here’s a screenshot link to a PDF I made of the mockup for a proposed project that would include this:
[ Mockup (PDF) ]