Rundown

Rundown Logo
Rundown Main Screen
Rundown Help Screen
Rundown Main Search
Rundown Results Screen

Inspiration

When learning about new concepts on your own, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Finding complex information can be discouraging for beginners starting to learn something new. We thought of an application that narrows a broad topic down to keywords, and similar articles that help students and researchers. Essentially Rundown will guide users to simpler related topics, and provide suggestions on what academic articles to start exploring. Rundown is great for the early stages of brainstorming, finding and learning more about topics and the final stretch to completing a reseach project.

What it does

Rundown uses a series of input words to provide the most related and frequently referenced academic keywords and articles. Our project is useful for finding related topics to explore research options given a broad topic. This web application provides suggestions on where to start exploring when learning about new concepts. Using an API, our website searches through Google Scholar and tailors your results based on the most relevant article. Rundown finds articles which cite or are cited by the root article (the most relevant article), and distills the articles into the most frequently appearing keywords to best tailor to your search.

How we built it

We started Rundown by prototyping and designing the UI/UX in Figma. After the designing process, we used HTML, CSS and JavaScript for the frontend part which was simply displaying the colours, images and taking the input from the textbox. Our backend part was built with Python which included implementing the scraping capabilities and using the API to find the most relevent artilces according to Google Scholar. This web application is hosted in glitch.

Challenges we ran into

While constructing the web-scraper, we ran into problems with Google Scholar as it was unable to handle the number of requests we were making with our web-scraper and thus had to use a proxy (crawlera) to bypass this hurdle. Additionally, joining the front-end and back-end was a challenge for us as we did not have experience with this before.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is proud of bringing an idea from concept to creation and challenging ourselves with new tools and concepts we had never fully implemented before. Each of us went out of our comfort zone to learn more about different tools and aid one another in creating this project.

What we learned

We learned how to use Figma, an interface design tool that we used to create our prototype at UI/UX. In our prototyping stage, we learned more about creating a simple design and user friendly application. In our backend development, we learned how to use API's and incorporate them into our own project.

While a couple of us have some programming experience, translating that experience into something actionable and presentable through a UI was particularly challenging. We had experience with front-end development and scripting, but no experience joining the two. Learning about different APIs available and what tools we really needed to master to get the job done was something we all learned along the way.

What's next for Rundown

In the future, we plan to include search features for specific articles in rundown. Through this, populating related keywords and articles will be easier with this feature. This would allow users to specify their searches even further than just three key words. In addition to this, we hope to include a suggested search bar. Currently, our search bar relies on the user only to input specific search words. Many other search engines and websites include this feature and we aim to do the same.