IN FEBRUARY OF LAST YEAR, the New York Times announced that it was giving away the keys to 28 years of data—news stories, movie reviews, obituaries, and political statistics, all for free. Staring at such a huge pile of information—about 2.6 million articles—we're faced with three important questions. How do we get the data we need? What can we do with that data? And, perhaps most importantly, why should we bother in the first place? In this chapter, I'll try to answer those questions. We'll see how to access information from the NYTimes Article Search API (http://developer.nytimes.com/docs/article_search_api), look at some practical visualization examples, and discuss how the new era of open data is opening doors for artists, entrepreneurs, designers, and social scientists.