The influential women index

Demo of app matching relevant pages against facebook
Demo of app matching relevant pages against a buzzfeed article
Demo of app matching relevant pages against a wikipedia article

Inspiration

The lack of recognition women get for their contributions causes a cultural devaluation of their social status. This contributes to a culture that is complacent in violence against women. The goal of this project is to elevate the status of women in society by recognizing the contributions of influential women and placing them in the spotlight. In this way we hope to challenge existing stereotypes and thus tackle the root cause of violence against women.

What it does

We are building a tool designed to integrate with existing websites such that users reading articles will be exposed to important women in our history and how they have helped progress humankind.

How we built it

We created an api using python and flask that takes the url of any article and matches it against articles from wikipedia about influential women. Document matching uses tf-idf to match documents against pre-scraped documents help in an in-memory database. We use beautiful soup to parse words from documents and nltk to stem them.

Challenges we ran into

We spent a lot of time planning the user interface for our plugin. A lot of us had a lot of different opinions on what we should prioritize for our user interface, so we spent a lot of time discussing how it should work and coming up with compromises.

We spent a lot of time thinking about how we would do document matching efficiently. This included how we determined the closeness of two articles and how we would efficiently cache this information for efficient access. We also went through a long tuning phase before we felt comfortable with the results from our search algorithm.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The document matching works very well. We had a lot of fun going to random pages and seeing what relevant pages came up.

What we learned

We learned the power of search and added a lot of breadth to our knowledge of web development. We were also introduced to a lot of interesting women who we may not have otherwise known about.

What's next for The influential women index

The first priority for us is definitely to add more women to the index. Currently our database only contains women in a few areas: prime ministers, scientists, CEO's of large corporations, and humanitarians. Ideally we would like to expand this to cover all women, but we did not have the time during the hackathon to download all their wikipedia pages to insert into our database.

The project may also be extended to highlight and empower the achievements of other under-represented groups besides women. We can imagine a very similar extension that shows relevant accomplishments of people of color, LGBTQ+ identified individuals, or folks in any other specific group. The infrastructure is there to put the highlight on anyone.

Built With

chrome
fault-tolerance
flask
in-memory-database
javascript
jquery
love
nltk
python
rest
tf-idf
wikipedia

Submitted to

CHIMEHACK 3

Created by

I worked on getting the search results to the user. Setting up the api such that our matching documents could be sent over the network and creating the chrome extension that would pull in appropriate information from the api. Also helped with document matching.

Andrew Nelson
Worked on converting Markup language to plain text and returning a summary.

Michael Woodson
I worked on designing/implementing data structures for efficiently storing and querying our article database based on "interesting" sets of words. I also helped develop the Flask API to hook together the frontend and backend components.

Aakash Sethi
I worked on the backend portion, including the tf-idf system that includes the frequency dictionary with the NLTK package, scoring, and weighting system.

Jonathan Chianglin