newsatlasbr is a package created to give easier access to the datasets of the News Atlas project, which is an initiative that researches and maps news organizations in the Brazilian territory.
The package facilitates data extraction from the project open-data API, developed by Volt Data Lab.
Currently, the newsatlasbr package can be installed directly from its GitHub repository:
if (!require("devtools")) install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("voltdatalab/newsatlasbr")Once installed, it can be loaded using the library function.
library(newsatlasbr)newsatlasbr has three groups of functions:
- Sign-in to the API to retrieve a token;
- Get aggregate data from municipalities, states or regions and map those data;
- Get data on the news organizations.
For a complete overview of those groups, users can check out tutorials in English and Portuguese.
To access News Atlas' API, users should be registered and insert their e-mail and password for authentication. atlasbr_signin function registers these information on the current R session, so that it can be used to obtain the Bearer token to extract data using the API.
As noted, the function sets the e-mail and password in the current R environment. Thus, users should repeat this operation on every new R session in which they intend to use the newsatlasbr package. We stress that user and password are personal. Therefore, users should be careful when writing and saving them in R scripts, in order to avoid sharing these information.
Two functions allows the users to extract data on every Brazilian municipality (get_municipalities()) and every news organizations in the country (organizations_state(state = "all")). Users should note, however, that there can be more efficient options depending on the request they wish to make. We reccomend checking the tutorials to learn about them.
Lucas Gelape, for Volt Data Lab.