I am a PhD candidate at American University in Washington, DC. I am interested in state formation and governance in low income countries. My dissertation examines the influence of foreign aid on incumbent advantage in African presidential elections.
I have been playing around with the New York Times API and Processing over the last few days for a project I am working on. I am looking at how the Times’ coverage of Africa has shifted from 1981 (the earliest date accessible by the API) to 2008. The picture above shows the (predictable) spike in the number of New York Times articles about Rwanda in 1994.
Expect more visualizations of Times data over the next few weeks as I wrap up the project. I didn’t find anything earth shattering, but having data to back up hunches is always nice. If anyone wants to learn how to use processing I can’t recommend Processing and Visualizing Data enough. Both were written by the people who created the Processing language. The picture that I made above draws heavily on code written by Ben (one of the creators) in an example in his book.
When everything is finished I will post the code and the final visualizations to this page.
A final note: if you are interested in the link between media attention and violence, you should check out this recent post from Alex de Walle on the SSRC webpage.
