Glyf - Preserving Culture

potential t-shirt design

Inspiration

Our inspiration centered around the idea of preserving cultures, traditions, and stories. Growing up in America, our team members all can point to centuries of their own cultural histories that the western education systems deign not to touch. For example, three of our team members have Grandparents who lived through the partition, a topic rarely part of curriculum. We want to create a space where these stories can be recorded and learned, for everyone to access. Our goal is to create a platform where others could learn from the experience of those older and wiser, gaining an understanding of cultures– both their own and new– from a vast source of unaltered narratives.

What it does

Through our website, those who are not as technologically adept (i.e. the older generations) can record their stories to share with others. After recording their experiences in any language they are comfortable in, our website will translate and summarize their words into a short story. Users can view and search stories by keywords and time frames! This allows for a huge increase in accessibility to knowledge not often considered important by western cultures. This can help preserve histories and traditions that are not often emphasized in the history books.

How we built it

Using three OpenAI APIs, we record the stories, and transcribe them into text– translating into English when necessary. Then, using another API, we created a summary and tagged the important aspects associated with the story. This is then posted onto a CSV file, where it is stored until we print it back out onto our stories page. We also have a separate recording page, where the user and import their own stories. Our backend is designed to run on Python, the front end utilizes JavaScript/HTML/CSS, and we used Flask to connect the two together.

Challenges we ran into

A big challenge that we faced was connecting the backend to the frontend. We initially ran into a CORS error which we worked through. We also don't utilize a database, so figuring out how to store our data was a challenge. Figuring out how to efficiently interact with, access, and modify data was another challenge we faced that stemmed from not using a database. Finally, another struggle was figuring out how to update the frontend with new submissions for stories.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of our organized and easy-to-navigate frontend- we want to prioritize a smooth user experience because one of our target users are elderly people who might not feel the most comfortable navigating a complicated website. Additionally, we are proud that our website can understand and interpret many languages- not just English! This allows for users of many cultures, languages, and backgrounds to interact with the site and keep their cultures and experiences alive.

What we learned

We learned how to connect the backend to the frontend successfully using Flask, a powerful web framework in Python. This allowed us to create dynamic and interactive web applications, enabling seamless communication between the user interface and the server-side logic. We also learned how to work with Open AI APIs. Figuring out how to successfully store our data for later access was also something that we worked with.

What's next for Glyf - Preserving Culture

We're excited to further elevate our website to new heights, ideally adding more features, content, and social interactivity to create an unparalleled experience for our users in the future! For example, we want to allow users to upload pictures for their stories, as it can create interest