Celebrating Diversity Through Tech

Inspiration

We wanted to create a program that celebrates diverse cultures and identities. Diversity is so important, and it is definitely something that should be celebrated. Diversity allows for discussion, debate, and progress, and it helps improve our understanding of both ourselves and the world around us. By sharing music, books, and podcasts that represent and celebrate diversity, we hope to empower and amplify the voices of minorities and marginalized communities everywhere. Music, books, and podcasts are unique and effective forms of communication that connect and resonate with so many people despite distance or time, and making people feel seen through diverse representations can help cultivate a culture of support and inclusivity both in the virtual and real world.

What it does

By texting “LEARN”, the app gets the current month and sends a text back, listing the observances in the given month and introducing you to its features. The user may text back one of the following numbers (a number corresponds to an observance from the current month) to learn more and get recommendations for media that represent and celebrate the cultural community.

The app first retrieves a summary of the observance from Wikipedia. For the media aspects, the app takes a Spotify Song Playlist ID to send a request to retrieve the title, artist, and link of a randomly selected song, outputs the name and link of a Spotify podcast, and retrieves the information randomly selected book from a list of authors through a query to the Google Books API.

How we built it

Initially, we had to decide what types of media to include like music, podcasts, recipes, books, movies, articles, famous individuals, facts, or quotes. Eventually, we settled with music, podcasts, and books because they are applicable to all celebrations and are the most engaging. Thus, we gathered a list of Spotify playlists for music, a selection of podcasts, and names of authors to retrieve books for each celebration.

The app is coded with Python and Flask and deployed with Heroku. We used several API’s (Twilio API, Spotify API, and Google Books API) in our app to retrieve the desired media information.

On Heroku, we added some configuration variables for the Spotify API which requires a changing token generated by Spotify access credentials. Our project loaded a JSON we wrote that contains information for our API requests (ex. the observances for the month and related Spotify Playlist ID and authors relating to each observance).

We designed the app with the idea of simplicity and easy use. We worked on ensuring that the content was in a clear and readable format, and we included links to the songs, podcasts, and book preview to allow for easy accessibility.

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble querying the Spotify Podcast API which was recently introduced a few months ago. Furthermore, there was a character limit on the text, so we had to truncate the size of the summary from Wikipedia. Another challenge we faced was that not every month had a celebration, which we overcame by creating a default message that links to a website on inclusivity and diversity. Also, we tried to include as many month-long celebrations as possible based on Wikipedia’s list of month-long observances, yet we understand we may have been limited and unable to include many other important celebrations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is the first time we’ve ever used Flask and successfully deployed an app through Heroku. This is also the first time we’ve used several API’s in one application and the first time using the APIs for Twilio, Spotify, and Google Books. After scrolling through tons of documentation and conducting many tests, we are glad that we could integrate the APIs in our application!

What we learned

Through gathering a list of Spotify playlists, podcasts, and authors, we were able to learn more about diverse cultures and identities. We learned a lot about various celebrations and increased our cultural exposure, which has inspired us to learn more about these unique communities and help amplify their voices,

What's next for Celebrating Diversity Through Tech

In the future, we hope to add more celebrations and more media types like recipes, quotes, and important figures from diverse and marginalized communities. We want to expand this program by including holidays like Juneteenth and cultural New Years. Also, we hope to work on code optimization.