#newlib

[micahvandegrift]

#alt-LIS

Want a preview of the crux of my webinar tomorrow? I propose that we blend R. David Lankes' "New Librarianship" definition with Bethany Nowviskie's #alt-ac (alternative academic) to define our New Roles for these New Times. 

I give you - #alt-LIS (v0.1):

a broad set of information-oriented professions, in which there are new opportunities to improve our communities through knowledge creation and application of principles of information access, [re]use and a DIY ethic.

[paultag]

python-sunlight (or: get at some awesome US Political data programmatically)

I've spent a few days during work, after work and on the weekend working on python-sunlight, a unified API implementation of a few Sunlight services.

This is very unstable, and not released yet (so please don't rely on it yet), but it will be shortly.

Be sure to sign up for an API Key, and dump the key to ~/.sunlight.key -- there's a simple script to help with some of this in bin/, but nothing solid yet.

I do, however, encourage you to use it and play around with it, and report your bugs.

Contributions (in the form of code) are also very welcome, so please do fork the project and play around with it.

Just to give everyone a taste of how cool this is -- this will pull up a list of twitter IDs of people who mention "free market" more then anyone else according to the congressional record:

from sunlight import capitolwords from sunlight import congress for person in capitolwords.phrases_by_entity( "legislator", phrase="free market", sort="count", ): n = congress.legislators( bioguide_id=person['legislator'], all_legislators="true" ) if len(n) >= 1: n = n[0] if n['twitter_id'] != "": print n['twitter_id']

And the output:

RepRonPaul stevekingia SenSherrodBrown JacksonLeeTX18 SenatorLeahy ChuckGrassley SenJohnMcCain OrrinHatch DanaRohrabacher JudgeTedPoe McConnellPress edtowns SenatorDurbin SenatorSessions SenatorHarkin SenChrisDodd russfeingold RosLehtinen sencarllevin senjonkyl Dennis_Kucinich senatorsanders SenatorReid RepDanBurton RepMikePence SenSamBrownback joebiden FrankPallone ToddAkin senatorboxer RepTrentFranks JohnCornyn

Have fun!

Show off what'cha got, and please let me know if you do something cool!