The New York Times Devel­oper Net­work is the media outlet’s “API clear­ing­house” offer­ing details of how you can get access to the exten­sive data they have released (from sto­ries dat­ing back to 1981).

Using this API, Jer Thorp has cre­ated some visu­al­i­sa­tions of NYT trends using Pro­cess­ing (a lan­guage I keep promis­ing to take a seri­ous look at). Two of my favourites: the fre­quency of the words ‘com­mu­nism’ and ‘ter­ror­ism’ in NYT arti­cles since 1981, and an abstract visu­al­i­sa­tion of the occur­rence of the term ‘organic’.

Hot on the heels of The New York Times, The Guardian announced yes­ter­day the release of their Open Plat­form which allows access to data from full-text arti­cles back to 1999. The Open Plat­form con­sists of the Con­tent API and the Data Store. Jer Thorp has already com­piled a brief intro­duc­tion to The Guardian’s API and has cre­ated a few early visu­al­i­sa­tions.

Also: Carl Mor­ris on what this is all about and why it’s excit­ing and impor­tant.