Inspiration
In this age, young people are reading the news less and less. In fact, the majority of people only read the first half of a news article, and many visitors don’t even scroll past the opening screen link. For our project, we wanted to reinvent the way modern humans get their news, encouraging them to read more. By combining traditional news sources and modern forms of communication, we created ‘Gif the News,’ a site with news articles summarized into GIFs. By analyzing the content and sentiment of real news articles, we break them down into discrete snippets of information that can be translated into individual GIFs. With this website, readers can now engage with more news, sparking their curiosity and inspiring them to read the article in full.
What it does
Our website translates news articles, both from the internet and from user input, into 5 GIF comics that can be easily digested by the reader.
How we built it
We built our code in Python using lots of different libraries for help with data analysis and using a few different APIs for data collection (GIFs and news articles).
Challenges we ran into
Our team is made up of 3 mechanical engineers, and 1 electrical engineer. Our coding experience consists of an introduction to computer science class. During the first few hours we struggled through remembering Python syntax, but slowly things came back. Later on, we encountered all kinds of fun problems; from merge conflicts to APIs not acting as we initially thought, to random unknown print statements showing up, we did our share of debugging.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Determining a method of analyzing text for themes and sentiment as well as analyzing gifs for the same. We had not worked with image learning before and were excited to delve into it.
Something that we're really proud of is our perseverance throughout the hackathon. It was our first hackathon. We worked well as a group and were able to come out with a project that we are proud, no matter how silly the concept is.
What we learned
Throughout the hackathon we learned a ton about using different APIs and doing in-depth analysis of both text and images. We also learned about creating web-apps and deploying them.
What's next for Gif the News
Our continuing goals for Gif the News would be to have a continually updating homepage that pulls current trending articles from the internet. We would also like to improve how we use the tags from the GIPHY API to find more relevant GIFs.
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