Treeage

Visualizing academia

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Inspiration

We are both motivated undergraduate researchers at UCSD that work in computer science and computational neuroscience labs. When we first started, we were overwhelmed with the amount of research that existed in our respective areas. Academia is inundated with old and new papers, and being able to perform novel research relies on knowing what already exists. We built Treeage, a combination of Tree and Triage, to provide an easy and visually appealing way to explore the most relevant papers in any field.

What it does

Treeage is an infinitely expandable user experience that displays a root paper, which can be found by searching the author:

  • Search to find an author's most cited paper.
  • From that root paper, branch out to see the most relevant papers that cite that root paper
  • Click on a paper to center it and display the author, title, and abstract
  • Click on the outermost paper to expand the tree
  • See the number of times that paper has been cited displayed in the center of each paper

How we built it

We programmed Treeage in python. We used two main packages, tkinter for the graphical user interface and Scholarly for the google scholar information.

Challenges we ran into

We encountered problems with the original GUI package we were using, which is why we ended up switching to tkinter. The math behind creating the fractal-like patterns of the papers we wanted to display was also an unexpected challenge. Neither of our main programming languages' are python, but we were happy to face that challenge head-on!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the progress we were able to make on this project in just 36 hours. While subsisting on mainly coffee and peanut-butter filled cliff bars, we created a tool that we know we would use in our academic lives.

What we learned

Over the course of this hackathon, we both became more comfortable with python and learned the importance of teamwork.

What's next for Treeage

We want to see where this wild ride will take us! Treeage 2.0 will expand the search options to include searches by paper title and key word. We will also improve the graphics, so that when you click on a paper screen will glide to that position instead of jumping.

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