Top News Visualizer

Inspiration

I have always been interested in trending words being a linguistics minor and a search engine optimization intern, and have recently taken an interest in data visualization. I was hoping to combine both of these interests as my first full stack project! The project allows us to perform interesting comparative analysis by observing news trending in different regions, be in the same area or in different continents. This is not only helpful because of the sheer entertainment found in visualizing trend differences based on geolocation even in today's global village, or the swift shift from election to celebrity gossip, but can also be used for journalistic purposes during important global events to display which countries' experiences are affected and which are not.

What it does

The website generates markers for random countries and classifies them into positive neutral or negative depending on the top trending news in that country at that moment. One can hover over the markers and also check what is currently trending there.

How we built it

I first got an API key from Google Cloud Console, worked on the backend on google colab parsing data from YouTube and creating a dataframe. Then, I took it to vscode. I started frontend with javascript and rendered on Render.

Challenges we ran into

I first wanted to work with Google Trends, but as there was no official API, I decided to move to a news source. However, they quickly hit API limits or had no free tier. Finally, I moved to YouTube, as the APIs were available through Google Cloud Console as well.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

First full stack project and first time doing frontend!

What we learned

I learned how to deploy, how to connect frontend to backend, how to work on frontend in the first place and worked with massive amounts of data. I also learnt the importance of UI.

What's next for Top News Visualizer

Adding more features, like filtering types of videos (integrating music/film+animation etc.) Adding viewcounts. Adding a sidebar showing a global trend.

Built With

• flask
• gemini
• google-cloud
• googlecolab
• javascript
• python
• render