We are submitting to the Education Track. https://drive.google.com/file/d/13ETArU-pMVvGwxXHQMsclnL-R7pjx4NW/view?usp=sharing
Inspiration: This project is aimed at providing a platform for artists and researchers who have spent lots of time creating these graphics- often, their work is seen once when it is posted on stories or shared, and then it gets lost in a sea of other posts. It's also difficult for a user to find infographics if they forget to save it but want to view it later. With our website, creators can get more exposure and users can find or discover infographics that relate to their interests. Additionally, if one would like to make an infographic about a topic but they are not sure if it's already been made, they can use our website to find out. We chose this project for the Education Track because it improves access to educational resources- these infographics often teach us something new but there's not a centralized gallery that allows us to look through all of them or to discover new ones.
What it does: Our website shows relevant infographics, sorts them by keywords and date, and allows for users to submit a URL to infographics they think should be included. All the links come from an excel spreadsheet that is populated by a Python script that finds relevant posts based on topics.
How we built it: We used a Bootstrap template for our website, editing in CodePen and using GitHub Pages to host our website. We created a Python Instagram scraper that searches through posts of a specified hashtag page for keywords, then adds the post's link and date posted to a database. This allows us to get a large range of infographics for our website with the necessary information to sort them for ease of use.
Challenges: Our biggest challenge is connecting the Python code to the website. We plan to use the Facebook API for getting Instagram embed codes, but we have not worked with APIs before so the process was slower than expected. Once we get the API working, we plan on using URL inputs from the spreadsheet for the API to access and add the embed code and the post to the website, making the process of adding posts automated.
Accomplishment: We're proud of how we had an idea and were able to walk through the steps of how to create a useful solution. We have many ideas for the future that we couldn't implement in this website, but we
What we learned We learned about APIs, and how to connect a frontend to a backend. We also learned how to use a bootstrap template and work with different website files in tandem (HTML, CSS, JS) to get the desired result on our website. Lastly, we discovered how to use our Python knowledge to get specific information from Instagram to populate our website.
What's next We hope that our future capabilities will include infographic factchecking, color sorting by ROYGBIV or average/majority color, sorting by the language of the post, and using a watermark credit on the images to ensure the artist/creator gets full credit for their work. We would also like to automate the process of getting URLs, accessing embed code from Instagram, then sorting posts as needed.
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