It’s been over 2 years since I stopped doing the ‘Something for the Weekend’ series. I thought I would revive it with a tutorial on They Work For You and Google Refine…

If you want to add political context to a spreadsheet – say you need to know what political parties a list of constituencies voted for, or the MPs for those constituencies – the They Work For You API can save you hours of fiddling – if you know how to use it.

An API is – for the purposes of journalists – a way of asking questions for reams of data. For example, you can use an API to ask “What constituency is each of these postcodes in?” or “When did these politicians enter office?” or even “Can you show me an image of these people?”

The They Work For You API will give answers to a range of UK political questions on subjects including Lords, MLAs (Members of the Legislative Assembly in Northern Ireland), MPs, MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament), select committees, debates, written answers, statements and constituencies.

When you combine that API with Google Refine you can fill a whole spreadsheet with additional political data, allowing you to answer questions you might otherwise not be able to.

I’ve written before on how to use Google Refine to pull data into a spreadsheet from the Google Maps API and the UK Postcodes API, but this post takes things a bit further because the They Work For You API requires something called a ‘key’. This is quite common with APIs so knowing how to use them is – well – key. If you need extra help, try those tutorials first. Continue reading →