WeSearch

WeSearch aims to increase access to complex academic research through a social platform designed to bridge the gap between researchers and curious students, especially those who are differently-abled.

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Inspiration

    Inspiration struck on Friday night, when Accenture presented their challenge for this year: “Promote and describe your technically complex project to a non-technical audience including a CEO and a 5th grader.” The challenge seemed clear and straightforward: deliver technically complex information through simple, palatable explanation. This idea struck us as quite powerful, and it led us to not only pursue a project that could be communicated in this way, but to actually make this principal core to the project itself. Thus, WeSearch was born.

What it does

    WeSearch aims to increase access to technically complex academic research through a social platform designed to bridge the gap between researchers and curious students everywhere, with a focus on accessibility for differently-abled users. We drew additional inspiration from the YouTube channel “Two Minute Papers”, which takes highly complex scientific papers and presents the information in short, digestible videos suitable for the attention spans of modern YouTube users. With WeSearch, our aim is to take this concept in conjunction with community engagement to create something that cultivates curiosity and benefits our users.

    Verified researchers can share their work, and users will engage with that content in a few ways. Any user can create a ‘Summary’ of the work, which is then community-voted or even highlighted by the original poster (OP). OP can create discussion topics underneath their post in effort to direct the conversation, and top Summaries with labelled complexity ratings appear for all users to see.

    Users can subscribe to tags. Tags include things like: Universities, Fields of Study, Faculty, University Departments, Key Terms. Various pages within the app filter these tags in different ways, allowing users to explore a wealth of information, all complete with condensed, understandable summaries, and community discussion dedicated to this understanding. Of course, non-verified users can also post, but not their own work. Any unverified account has access to a built in Google Scholar search function, which allows the user to share peer-reviewed articles along with their own comments, summaries, or discussion topics.

    Something that is important to us, and also central to the idea that started this project, is the ability for *anyone* to have access to academic information. To accomplish this, we built in Voice Menuing and Text-To-Speech functionality to assist those in need.

How we built it

    After brainstorming and mapping out all the functionality we wanted to implement, the web application started off as a bare template on codepen.io for a phone. We started by creating our core features, the research pages, and incorporating those in a manner we liked using the HTML, CSS, and JS editors on CodePen. After we had that functionality, we edited the style of the app to match a more professional look before adding auxiliary functionality like accounts and settings.

Challenges and what we learned

    It was challenging to find direction at times. We found ourselves wanting to add so many different features that it became a little overwhelming. Thankfully, we were able to continually remind ourselves to stay user-focused and simple, and we were able to come up with something that has all the functionality it needs, without all the noise. Additionally, we learned a lot about web development and UX design, which challenged us in ways we didn’t expect over the course of the hackathon.

What's next for WeSearch

    I mentioned earlier that it’s important to keep the functionality simple and user-focused. Adding too much functionality can make things confusing, but not always. The next step for WeSearch is incorporating more tools to help make research accessible and understandable. This might include user comments incorporated into an updated paper-reading environment. If a reader came across a difficult paragraph in a paper that included lots of technical jargon or less-than-clear wording, user-generated and user-voted paragraph summaries could assist with understanding in real time. We could also find ways to highlight individual words or phrases for users to mouse over and find more information.
    More broadly, we want to continue to find ways to make research accessible. One of the challenges we face is finding incentive for researchers to share their work with us, while finding ways around the monetary challenges posed by gaining access to work published elsewhere. How could the entirety of a research paper be shared if it’s already published in a paid journal? Assuming we can solve this problem, one incentive for researchers to engage with the platform is that they can reach a wider audience. Another reason is that researchers can engage in discussion with students and people outside the field to gauge what information is being understood, what people find confusing, and what people find most interesting.

Contact

 Project Lead: Connor Voigt: Slack User ID https://swamphacks-vii.slack.com/team/U01LSAY52JV

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