Inspiration
Memes are generated by bots given various source material. Why not take source material from real and satirical news sources and generate our own "news"?
What it does
A scraper was used to get data from headlines and article contents. The scraped data was used to generate Markov chains for each field. Then, a noun from the headline was chosen, and an image is added to the article as well.
How I built it
React Native was used for the front-end. GraphQL was used to act as an API for the PostgreSQL database. A python script was used to scrape the data from news sources.
Challenges I ran into
Originally, it was planned that we would develop exclusively for Android because it would work on a simulator on Linux, but a package would not correctly link in React Native, so we decided to just not waste any extra time on the linking and just focus on developing for iOS instead. Scraping required us to manually input a lot of links, so the data is sparse. With more time to flesh out the scraper and gather more data, the language processing would be more natural and there would be fewer repeated phrases.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We had the front-end of the app finished pretty much by the end of the first night, with minor styling updates later.
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