The Informed Citizens Project

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  Results from Google Custom Search API for the New Yorker and Impeachment

Inspiration

This project was inspired by Rachel Augustine's mother. She cares deeply about understanding the whole picture of the political spectrum and actually reads news on sites from all sorts of backgrounds from CNN to The Federalist! For most millennials and GenZ-ers, however, the time needed to do this kind of thorough reading is impossible to find. That's where The Informed Citizens Project comes in.

What it does

Our website takes a search term and returns the first website for 13 major news sites from all sides of the political spectrum. It also does some basic sentiment analysis on each website.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS, and Javascript to built the functionality of the website itself. We then linked Google Custom Search API to the search bar, which then returns all of the websites.

Challenges we ran into

None of us are experts in Javascript! We all had experience running complex programs locally, but it was a learning curve to discover how to send jobs to a server to run the program for us and then return the correct result.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the Google Custom Search API to communicate with the HTML and display results correctly.

What we learned

Lots about Javascript and website development.

What's next for The Informed Citizens Project

We would like to continue this project with an eye to expanding the NLP aspects of the site itself. Ideally, the site would have live statistics that update about all of these sites. We have an example of this prototype at our demo.

Built With

• css
• google-custom-search
• html
• javascript
• natural-language-processing
• nltk
• python