Times Traveler

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TimesTraveler - time traveling web app on a map

Entry for the TimesOpen 2014: Hack Day

Inspiration

I had an idea for an app that can act as a time machine for the location you are at. So say you are standing at the Empire State building and you open your app. You have a display of news and pictures from that location from this year. You can scroll left/right to see more of the same. But you can fast scroll down and scroll in to the past. And you see years decrease as you scroll.

What it does

Uses the NYT API to travel through time in Newspaper articles and map them on a CartoDB/OpenStreetMaps leaflet map.

Travel through time in New York Times newspaper articles on a map of New York City.

How we built it

This mobile application was built with vanilla HTML5 and JavaScript with ajax calls to the NYT API for articles on a specific date with location data. Many (most) of their data does not have location data - so this was a limiting factor.

This also made the app less Geo-location based and more of a mapping app.

Leaflet and OpenStreetMaps was used for the mapping, after finding CartoDB more than was necessary.