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Homework Two: Develop A Research Question

For this homework, you will sketch out a research question to focus on for the remainder of the week. Ideally, you will strike a balance between application to your actual research and the capabilities and limitations of the API or APIs you've researched.

In formulating your research question, ask yourself:

  • What sort of questions are possible to answer from the data available?
  • What will you have to do to work with this data in terms of manipulation, processing, storage, and so on?
  • Is this data complete? Does it tell the story it purports to tell?
  • Might the research benefit from combining more than one data set?
  • Is your research question concrete and specific?
  • Is the research question well-scoped? That is, is it possible to make inroads on this question during during the week?

Come to day three with a short formulation of your research question—perhaps one sentence and a few bullet points.

There will be some opportunity to revise and refine the research question, so don't feel stuck if there is something else they find they would prefer to pursue.

Students should come to day 3 with a short formulation of their research question (perhaps one sentence and a few bullet points). There will be some opportunity to revise and refine the research question--so students need not feel stuck if there is something else they find they would prefer to pursue.

Project Ideas

Literature

  • Use the Google Books or Open Library APIs to find publication data for books published exactly one hundred years ago today.
  • Use the Goodreads API or iTunes API to find star-ratings for each of a writer's works. Which works are better rated? Plot the results.

History

  • Using the New York Times API (or the API from another news source), find the number of articles published each year with the words "Protests" (or another search term) in their title. Plot these results.
  • Using the New York Times API (or another similar API), determine the US state or Canadian province that appears the most frequently in news articles. Bonus: does this change over time?

Music

  • Using a list of US states (or Canadian provinces), query the Spotify API to determine the number of songs written about each state.
  • Use the Songster API to determine the songwriter with the most complex songs, as measured by unique chords, or the most verbose songwriter, as determined by number of words.

Just for Fun

  • Write a simple program to get the current weather from the weather.com API (or equivalent), and then query the Open Movie DB for weather-appropriate movies. E.g., if it's raining, suggest Rain Man.
  • Write a program that takes a user-supplied book title, looks up that book via the Google Books API, and then uses the book's description to find an appropriate beer pairing, using the Beer API.
  • Make a data visualization of Pokémon data, using the Pokémon API. Which pokémon are the strongest?
  • Use the kitten or puppy placeholder API services to construct a mosaic of kitten pictures.

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