Title Nine API

This project watches for changes in Joshua Eaton's record of open Title IX investigations, and updates a small data API appropriately.

Caveat

At the moment, this is geared toward developers. If you open these URLs in your browser, unless you have a JSON viewer extension installed (like JSONView) and configured to display the JSONAPI.org media type application/vnd.api+json, you may be prompted to download a file of the data.

We're working on making this applicable to a broader audience, but our first use case is the API.

Examples

Get all cases

https://title-nine.herokuapp.com/cases

This will return a page of 25 cases. Links to more pages are at the bottom, below the total case count.

Get all cases in Massachusetts

https://title-nine.herokuapp.com/cases?filter[state]=MA

Add the filter[state]= with the two-letter abbreviation of the state you're looking for.

Get open cases in New Hampshire

https://title-nine.herokuapp.com/cases?filter[status]=open&filter[status]=NH

Options for statuses are open and closed.

Get all cases at Dartmouth College

https://title-nine.herokuapp.com/cases?filter[institution]=DARTMOUTH%20COLLEGE

The institution names are in all caps, and not immediately apparent. At the moment, we don't have full-text search (help us add it?), so you can't send 'HARVARD' and get all the cases for Harvard's various sub-schools.

Tech note: The %20 is how browsers represent spaces. If you typed the space into your browser, that would be fine.

Metadata

• institution: all-caps name of school
• state: two-letter abbreviation
• status: 'open' or 'closed', indicating whether the investigation is ongoing
• opened-at: when the DOE states the case was opened
• updated-at: the last time this case data was updated -- that is, the last time this program looked through the data and saw this case still in the data sheet we source from
• closed-at: When the case was closed. This is a best guess: we mark a case as 'closed' when it's no longer on the data sheet we pull our information from. If this date is null, it's not closed.

Dates are in the format YYYY-MM-DD, and times are in Eastern Time.

Roadmap

• Post updates to a Twitter bot.
• Put a splash page at the root path, to explain what it is and how to use it.
• Add Institution and State as models, with case counts.
• Geolocate institutions and provide state boundaries to make mapping this data easier.
• Can we make the names a little more presentable and approachable?
• Add filters on date attributes.
• Set up a custom domain.
• Mount the API at a subdomain.
• Add HTML index view so people can see, sort, and filter ongoing cases.
• Tip jar to pay for hosting, if we need to scale up.

Bigger Chunks

• Add OAuth-only login
• Add the ability for logged-in users to get:
  • Text message alerts
  • Email alerts and weekly summaries.
  • Webhooks (like to a Slack channel)
• Allow logged-in users to select the states and institutions they want to receive notices for, and whether they want to know about opened cases, closed cases, or both.

Contributing

Contact Matt Cloyd if you'd like to contribute to the design or development of this web app / API.

Contact Joshua Eaton if you'd like to get involved with this project in any other way -- be it using the data or anything else.