Newseum - connecting art with current events
A Hack@Brown 2017 Project written in 24 hours
We identified our common interests in media and art history, and wanted to find a way to connect them. How might we use art as an entryway to contemporary issues? How might we explore the correlation between breaking news and historical art? These are questions we aimed to answer, all while emphasizing the value and relevance of art history today.
The site displays a set of images from the Harvard Art Museum API, and when users select a piece, it displays a thematically similar current events news headline. We wanted to make browsing the news akin to browsing an art gallery.
This site pulls top stories from Bing using Microsoft's Bing News Search API and generates keywords from the stories using Microsoft's Text Analytics API and then uses those keywords to displays a set of images from the Harvard Art Museum API. Once we gathered this information, we built this site with Polymer to pair an image with the most thematically similar headline.
First, install Polymer CLI using npm (we assume you have pre-installed node.js).
npm install -g polymer-cli
This command serves the app at http://localhost:8080 and provides basic URL
routing for the app:
polymer serve --open
This command performs HTML, CSS, and JS minification on the application
dependencies, and generates a service-worker.js file with code to pre-cache the
dependencies based on the entrypoint and fragments specified in polymer.json.
The minified files are output to the build/unbundled folder, and are suitable
for serving from a HTTP/2+Push compatible server.
In addition the command also creates a fallback build/bundled folder,
generated using fragment bundling, suitable for serving from non
H2/push-compatible servers or to clients that do not support H2/Push.
polymer build
This command serves the minified version of the app at http://localhost:8080
in an unbundled state, as it would be served by a push-compatible server:
polymer serve build/unbundled
This command serves the minified version of the app at http://localhost:8080
generated using fragment bundling:
polymer serve build/bundled