Inspiration
We were inspired by the connection that art encourages between individuals and collectives. Additionally we want to connect people to the historical and cultural art forms which are slowly being lost to time. Sadly people currently are becoming disconnected from creativity, due to fear of failure, choice paralysis, etc. So we wanted to encourage people to become more connected with art forms related to their interests, culture and history. In turn connecting them with local communities with the same interests.
What it does
Our website shows the user a new endangered art form every day which is selected based on their interests and country (selected when they create an account). On the main page it will contain the art form for the day with a short blurb describing the history known about it, in the form of a Wikipedia page. Additionally there is a basic tutorial on how to do the art form generated by a LLM and in the future we plan to include links to facebook communities which are based around the art form.
How we built it
For the front end we initially made a basic skeleton for how we wanted the website to look and function, from here some of us could work further on the layout. For the back end is uses a data from Unesco (intangible cultural heritage) data set and Wiki data to get the information of the different art forms. UNESCO labels data based on how endangered the art form / culture is and wiki data gives the information about it. Both are publicly available data sets. The backend is coded using python specifically using the Flask library to connect the frontend.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into challenges connecting the front and back end as most of us were new to using git hub so we struggled with working on the same code leading to us having different CSS code which we had to unify at the end, before we could effectively connect the back end.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Overall we are pretty proud of coming up with the idea and learning all the things which are involved in making a website as most of us worked on something we did not have extensive experience with.
What we learned
We learnt more about how to work together on a coding project and the role of git in it. We also learned more about what goes into a website and the steps which we should take to make sure that we can work together effectively such as making sure we understand our role and how to integrate our work with others through git.
What's next for Before We Forget
What we would like to do next is improve the generation of new daily art forms as currently the only one which changes is the main one of the day and the other side pages only have fixed information at the moment. Additionally many of the community pages are also fixed links and do not change with the topic, while there are many facebook groups which are easy to find it would be better if we could take the extra step of looking for the community groups linked to each art form so the user does not have to search for it themselves.
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