reYAKtions

Using campus yaks (from yik yak) to find the most positive (or negative) school according to its students

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Inspiration

Many prospective students arrive on campuses and analyze Yik Yak feeds. This can be time consuming and imprecise. We decided to employ Indico to ascertain campus sentiment, and generate a word cloud so prospies can see hot button issues on campus.

What it does

Allows students who are searching for colleges to find out exactly how the students are feeling at that school based on the campus' recent yaks.

How we built it

We're running a Ubuntu server using AWS, using Flask as our web development framework, Bootstrap (so that the fact that we're not designers doesn't show too much). Yik Yak doesn't have a public API, but we found an open source python library for interfacing with it (link). We're also using Indico for sentiment analysis of the yaks and a jQuery plugin (link) for the word cloud.

Challenges we ran into

Google maps presented a few issues, but eventually we got it working. Initially, the project might not have happened given the lack of an official Yik Yak API. We tested a few unofficial ones, and eventually settled on a Python library. It was also challenging to move different components between development environments.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We've incorporated many different libraries, frameworks, and APIs to create a responsive website, so we're pretty happy they're all working together.

What we learned

Most of us tried tools we weren't familiar with, so

What's next for reYAKtion

Now that we have a website (maybe), students from anywhere can view and monitor sentiment at their potential colleges. Potential new features include: viewing yaks associated with words on the word cloud by clicking on them, better school look-up, displaying controversial yaks (those with lots of comments), or generating an overall school grade, which is independent of yaks from a limited period of time. Additionally, we might benefit from some more design work.

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