Vignette Blog Post
Jessica Ayers 2023-06-22
Vignette Blog Post
Explanation of Project & Interesting Findings
I used the Open Movie Database API (omdbapi) to create my vignette. In the project, I created a function to return both a single random movie and a data frame with 10 random movies. The theme of the project was movies with different colors in the titles. The options provided were blue, red, and green along with years of 2000, 2010, 2020. There were 9 combinations of possible results. For the exploratory data analysis, only the data frames were used as more movie titles were returned from the API. Each call using the search and year parameters for the omdbapi returned only 10 titles. Three data frames were combined from each of the available years in the created function. It was found that the data base contained games, movies, and tv series with very few sequels. Since only character data was returned from the api in the form of a data frame, a numerical variable representing the length of the title was created. Contingency tables, numerical summaries, and plots were created to describe the data in different ways.
Reflection
Overall, I found this project very beneficial in improving my API and GitHub skills. It took some time to figure out how to get the omdbapi to return actual data. At first it was only returning a single movie at a time. With summaries and plots as the end goal, having one data point is not very efficient. After a while I was able to get the API to return 10 movies at a time. This was something I could work with! Connecting the API and having it return multiple movie titles was the most difficult part in beginning this project. Another situation that caused some difficulty was that the data frames only returned character data. It gave the title, year, imdbID, and type of program. When searching for a specific title, the API returned a single random movie. More data was provided with that output, but a single data observation is not something that can easily be worked with. The most difficult programming piece was the inclusion of for loops in creating the two new variables. When approaching a similar project in the future, I would make sure that the API I am working with is outputting exactly what kind of data I need to do further analysis.