Memorabilia

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Inspiration

We were first inspired by the general prompt, thinking of ways we can connect the past to the present. We considered ways that the landscape around us has changed over time comparing the natural greenery of Renaissance paintings to our concrete-filled society today. We decided to narrow down the concept of "past" into culture, wanting to create a way to dive into the cultural history of our local communities and see how they've changed over time. We took inspiration from the Renaissance / Baroque periods for our UI.

What it does

This site allows users to delve into the cultural history of various local communities. The user can search for a particular cultural group and location, and the AI will generate a narrative summary of that group based on the personal stories in the database. It will also produce "story cards" which contain each individual anecdote that contributed to the narrative.

It also displays an interactive map showing where exactly each anecdote came from, allowing the user to see the origins of each tale. If a particular story card resonated with the user, they can save it to their personal timeline, where they can view all of their saved stories in chronological order.

If no story results were found, the user can also contribute their own story to expand the database.

How we built it

On the back-end, we have 2 AI agents: One retrieves personal story data from the dataset, and the other injects stories into the database. On the front-end, we used React and Next to connect the interface to our backend and build our UI.

Challenges we ran into

We experienced challenges with merging conflicts, causing a minor setback when trying to sync our work after we split for the night. We also faced challenges with choosing datasets, such as determining which datasets had clean data. Alongside these, we struggled with some aspects of general implementation such as routing to our "contribute stories" page when no story results were found.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of being able to successfully implement all of our planned features before the deadline given our challenges above. We're also proud of our ability to collaborate as a team to resolve all of those challenges without conflict.

What we learned

We developed a greater understanding of how frontend and backend interact through our mutual collaborative effort. We also gained a stronger understanding of how to utilize libraries and APIs in our projects through implementing the interactive map and authorization system.

What's next for Memorabilia

We plan to expand our dataset to other states and countries to illustrate a more in-depth and personalized narrative of various cultural groups across the world.