Brainfeed: a tool for domain experts to find recent and relevant public discourse on topics they are familiar with

Title

Brainfeed

A tool for domain experts to find recent and relevant public discourse on topics they are familiar with

Leaders

Yohan Yee (Mattermost: yohan, Twitter: @therealyohanyee)

Collaborators

Chi-Hsun (Eric) Chang (Mattermost: eric-ch-chang , Twitter: @chchang8305)

Brainhack Global 2021 Event

BrainHack Toronto

Project Description

Brainfeed is a proposed tool that is aimed at scientists to keep track of active and relevant public discussions on topics that they are familiar with. The general idea is that in forums such as Reddit, links to scientific articles are posted and a public discussion often follows; in these discussions there are often questions or misconceptions that may be best clarified by experts. Brainfeed seeks to track these discussions and notify experts when there are discussions/questions that are relevant to them.

Initial development of this project is aimed at tracking neuroimaging-related discussions on Reddit, but this tool could in principle be extended to any scientific field and could also track other forums such as Twitter. Details on getting started, resources, etc… are available in the README.md doc on the project Github page (https://github.com/yohanyee/brainfeed)

Link to project repository/sources

https://github.com/yohanyee/brainfeed

Goals for Brainhack Global

A list of specific goals for this Brainhack, along with future goals, can be found in the Github README.md file.

The general goal for Brainhack Toronto is to lay down the general framework and structure of the project, along with some basic code aimed at the specific goals listed in the README.md file; further development can occur after the event and will be coordinated through a Brainhack mattermost channel (https://mattermost.brainhack.org/brainhack/channels/brainfeed).

Good first issues

1. issue one: how to best classify posts as being relevant (neuroimaging related) or not?

2. issue two: how do we structure the post/comment database?

3. Issue three: what is the most engaging way to display discussions to experts?

Communication channels

For Brainhack Toronto 2021: https://discord.gg/6pq9RgtM

After the event, we will transition to the Brainhack Mattermost channel for further development: https://mattermost.brainhack.org/brainhack/channels/brainfeed

Skills

• Python (to scrape public discussions on scientific articles): any skill level
• NLP / text classification (to classify if discussions/questions are relevant): any skill level
• UX/UI (to display relevant discussions in a meaningful manner): any skill level

Onboarding documentation

See README.md

What will participants learn?

Some skills that may be learned:

• web scraping via Python APIs
• text mining and classification
• interfacing with databases (Firestore database)

Data to use

No response

Number of collaborators

more

Credit to collaborators

Contributors will be listed in a file on Github (probably the README.md using the all-contributors github bot )

Image

Leave this text if you don’t have an image yet.

Type

data_management, other

Development status

1_basic structure

Topic

other

Tools

other

Programming language

Python, html_css, javascript

Modalities

not_applicable

Git skills

0_no_git_skills, 1_commit_push

Anything else?

Topic: scientific communication

Things to do after the project is submitted and ready to review.

• Add a comment below the main post of your issue saying: Hi @brainhackorg/project-monitors my project is ready!
• Twitter-sized summary of your project pitch.