This project is the a datat visualization of articles of New York Times that contained the word "Marijuana". It consists of a printed poster of that shows the article count per year of New York Times from 1926 to 2014, and a website written in Javascript that show the snippets of the first ten articles of each year. The web scraping and visualizations were done in Processing & post-edited in Photoshop. The website prototype was done in javascript.

IDEATION & PROTOTYPING

I became interested in the discussion of legalizing Marijuana when I was living in California because of how passionate people were about that topic. I grew up where Marijuana-use was rare and barely mentioned in the media or in life compared to other drugs, and it made me wonder how far back did this plant show up in America, and when it was mentioned the most through out US history.

Video: I used the smoke particle library and created animated article count for every year. The higher the count, the higher the flame.

PROGRAMMING

I used the New York Times API and pulled the amount of articles with the word Marijuana in it, along with the headlines, from 1951 to 2014.

Tool : Processing

For the poster:
I worked in Processing and modified the smoke particle system example written by my teacher Dan Shiffman. The first sketch was a flaming bar graph, but I moved away from that wanting to create more abstract visualizations. I saved TIF files in Processing and created a poster in illustrator. The result are shown in the slideshow.

For the website:
When you select a year in the drop down menu, NYTimes will send back the titles of the first ten articles with the word Marijuana in it of that year. The years in the drop down menu were chosen because they had a drastic increase in article counts compared to previous years. They were the "peaks" as shown in the poster.

FINAL OUTCOME

Printed Poster - included peak years on the bottom

Website prototypes - pulling NYT article titles with keyword by year. Written in javascript.