Huffington Post

The Huffington Post is a platform for readers to enjoy articles and engage in topics of the 'now' in a safe and inviting space. The policy that Huffington Post if you are going to write an article or comment on someone else's work it needs to be respectful of not just the writer but to others who are going to read a comment and that this is a safe space to share your voice. Known as a liberal media outlet topics discussed include the news, politics, lifestyle, entertainment, impact, multimedia and voices.

It was started in 2005 by Arianna Huffington a political activist who sought an outlet for liberals to express themselves in an objection to conservative outlets.

A majority of the art was written under the topic of voices, specifically queer voices. This topic covers black voices, latino voices, women, queer, asian voices and parents. A great mix to get all sides of a story or understanding to how others live and think. With editions across the United States and the world voices are heard and news is spread.

Speculations

With the data I was able to collect in regards to publications about LGBTQ Art can be informed by other occurrences in politics, economy, and within the community itself. As Huffington Post is not a strictly LGBTQ oriented magazine the number of publications can be affected due to lack of awareness or need of the readers and writers at a particular time.

As art can come in many forms the Huffington Post as a place where you can search LGBTQ Art, brings different mediums together. Within my search there are articles and works of art that are in painting form as well as multimedia. Another way to search for information through Huffington Post about LGBTQ information is through Queer Voices which focuses on a lot of information regarding the community and what is happening around the world.

There are plenty of areas where the LGBTQ community crosses over within the topics that Huffington Post has created such as politics, books, Latino voices, as well as the arts & culture. Significantly the numbers represent what was happening at the time in and to the community. The spike in activity in the creation of art and articles in 2015 can be heavily influenced by the decision of Obama to make same-sex marriage a federal law across all 50 states. This was a very positive action taken for better representation of the rights that all LGBTQ community members uphold and deserve for just being an American citizen.

The numbers start to decline and that can be for many reasons for those who write about LGBTQ art were not interested in what was being made, not enough was being made to be written about; which i do not think is the case, or there were other significantly important stories that were going on that were not just affecting the LGBTQ community but the entire nation. This was the presidential election of 2016 and that Trump took office. This entire political game was and has ruined our country's understanding for the other amongst us. Huffington Post was originally made as a liberal political blog, online newspaper, magazine etc. that the intensity of the political scene took over and the LGBTQ art was, not forgotten, but not a foresight for readers and writers. Although 2017 did not yield a number of publications for LGBTQ art, Queer voices have been consistent and up to date with other things that are happening within the community as well as to the community.

Methodology

I was able to web-scrape for the articles and the information using beautiful soup. Now this seems simple, Huffington Post made it a bit tricky for me to get all the information that I wanted like the date, title of the article, and the image 'src' link and the article url. I did a general search within the website for LGBTQ art and i was able to get three pages of results. Yet as I was continuing on with my script of scraping the page I realized some of the information did not live on the page that I was coding for. So this brought on a challenge that I was not expecting. From the initial search code I included a counter so that it would loop my code through all three pages of information. From that first page I was only able to scrape for the title of the article and the url, what was missing from the search page was the image 'src' link and the date of publication, which turns out to be very significant when looking at the data I am presenting above. What I needed to figure out was how to have my code read individual articles while simultaneously looping through the three pages of the search. With help from Matt I was able to do so. This included doing a loop of code through a loop of code essentially. After writing code out for the title and article url I scraped for a single_article by repeating the same set up of, the url, verifying the link, status code and introducing beautiful soup. Once I re-set this up I was able to scrape for the date_span and image_url and created a dictionary called one_article of all the data that I wanted to scrape for. Now to group both of the loops, one through the search page and the other through the individual articles i used the function of append. The entire code was called all_data which added with the function of append I included one_article. Now the json file could be written as all_data which included all the loops I wrote code for.

Now that I had a new file of just the data points in one json file grouped together, I was able to make a counter in a separate python file that would group together all the articles published by a certain date. In this case it was only from 2014-2017. The counter ultimately provided me with the data that is represented by the visualization above.