Neg-o-meter

Inspiration

Many people report feeling anxiety, fatigue and sleep loss as a result of reading the news. Constant exposure to negative and often catastrophized news leads to desensitisation and what Adam Curtis (exceptional documentary maker) called Oh Dearism - which is to have an inappropriately little response to horrific stories. The pandemic has only served to intensify our exposure to negative news, and with daily reports of death rates and safety guidelines changing one day to the next, many of us are feeling overwhelmed or powerless. Passively scrolling through the swathes of negative news only makes it worse.

A recent survey by American Psychological Association reported that 56% of adults in America report that regularly checking the news causes them stress. The long term health impacts of stress, anxiety and lack of sleep can have major consequences not only on one's mental wellbeing but one’s physical health as well - long term stress leads to increased risk of stroke, heart attack and obesity.

But we all know that it is extremely important to remain informed so that we can hold our politicians to account and keep ourselves and others safe during this global pandemic. How do we balance the need to stay informed without compromising our wellbeing?

By changing the way in which we engage with the news we can combat the feeling of powerlessness, overwhelm and Oh Dearism. That’s why we built Neg-o-meter to encourage users to move away from passively scrolling through news, to actively interacting with it. By increasing your awareness of how much negative news you consume, you can make sure you only consume in moderation to increase your resilience.

What it does

The browser extension analyses text on webpages you display, giving an overall sentiment expressed in the text. An interactive ‘emotional response rating’ element is also added to the pages you browse, so that you can quickly rate how what you read makes you feel.

The sentiment analysis results, and your personal rating can be accessed from the extension toolbar, and will show you the positive/negative balance breakdown of the content you have been reading.

All data is analysed on the client side, making this entirely private and personal to you, so you can become more aware of how news makes you feel.

How we built it

chrome extension
Vader-sentiment for sentiment analysis
webpack for bundling

Challenges we ran into

Working in a remote team
Collating and presenting data in a meaningful manner
Creating a user friendly design interface
Implementing purely client side data collection and analysis

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overcoming the challenges in the small time frame Although it does not have all the features we wanted, we are proud to have a working MVP and are looking forward to working on it beyond the hackathon

What we learned

Nobody in the team had made a chrome extension before so we learned how to do that.
We learned how to use sentiment analysis tools to analyse web content
We learned how to use webpack to bundle the sentiment analysis for use in browser extensions
Everything always takes longer than you expected.

What's next for Neg-o-meter

The product roadmap includes the following:

Identifying numbers in news article to encourage users to interrogate them and improve number literacy
Adding note taking features that allow further engagement with articles and that can be saved for users to review.