The login screen for Valence
Diary entry mode in Valence

Valence — an Intelligent Journal

Inspiration

My teammate and I both actively keep journals, because we love reflecting on our past experiences to relive the emotions of days gone by. At the same time, we are cognizant of how important it is for people — especially students! — to make sure that they avoid depressive slumps. To this end, we decided to build Valence to try and help users keep track of how their moods progress over time.

What is Valence?

Valence is a journaling program that integrates with Google Cloud’s Natural Language API to perform complex sentiment analysis on a user’s journal entries. It then displays the results in a visually appealing format, so that the user can reflect on what led to their days being better or worse. Valence is a desktop application with an accompanying data explorer web app, built to allow users to track their journal entries on the go.

Implementation

We coded the desktop app in Python, using the tkinter library to construct a GUI and the Google Cloud API to perform NLP calculations. The web app and API were constructed using MongoDB, Express, React and Node.js.

Challenges

We have had difficulty connecting our desktop and web apps, and this will remain an important point to focus on as we continue to push for seamless integration.