Inspiration
News and social media today are often biased, especially in politics. This makes it very difficult for an individual to make sense of a subject, especially controversial ones, as many articles are partisan and contain inherent bias. We wanted to increase transparency and make it easier for people to gather information by showing the views of all sides, not just one.
What it does
The Spin Room takes a chosen topic or subject and shows the user both the left-wing and the right-wing view of the subject to aid the user in decision making and information gathering.
How I built it
We split our application into two stacks due to the amount of data crunching required to deliver accurate comparisons to our users. In terms of our backend, we utilized various news aggregation APIs using Python with Flask and then did semantic analysis in order to determine the emotional connotation of the articles we were taking in. Then with some keyword analysis, we find articles talking about similar topics and thus present this to the user in a side by side view in the front end. For the frontend, we used Polymer 1.7 in order to efficiently manage the large amount of data coming from the service and allow the dev group to create syntactically powerful code which was time efficient.
Challenges I ran into
We had challenges getting the server to work, getting API to work, and getting the back end Python to work
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
What I learned
Java is not a good language for this sort of project due to the large number of imports and the amount of code required. Python was much better, requiring both less imports and less code to accomplish the same thing.
What's next for Spin Room
Future plans include allow social media sharing
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