We decided to use the New York Times bestseller API. Our vision was a program that allowed users to input a word and get a book recommendation in return. We considered approaching the actual search for the input words in several ways. Our first choice was to search the words in the book review section because there would be more opportunity for key words to appear. Unfortunately the API doesn’t include the text of reviews so we settled on our second choice, the description, which is slightly more literal.

We had problems searching the book descriptions using keywords as well. For example, searching for the word “cat” returned books with words that contained the letters c a t next to each other, like miscommuniCATion.

Another hiccup was that some books appeared multiple times if the keyword appeared in their description- these books were those that stayed on the NYT bestseller list for multiple weeks so they were entered into the data more than once.

Initial Brainstorming

We considered many project ideas- some were games, some were pun-based, some involved language and translation. We decided to work with APIs, our most recently introduced element. I was particularly interested in a humidity-based sketch that told you whether you would have a bad hair day or a good hair day, but that might be a future project.