Capstone Projects | Information School | University of Washington

Symposia - A Bird's Eye Perspective of the News

Our project is a bold undertaking that seeks to combat the advent of over-personalization of news feeds and the inability to see the “bigger” picture within news media. These issues can create echo chambers which lead to increased partisanship and the general spread of misinformation. We created a web application that consolidates the news from different outlets to offer a more in depth analysis of the news media. Through this, we provide our users with conceptual visualizations of a developing story, while allowing users to hone in on topics that interest them and allowing for balanced viewpoints amongst these topics.

Targeted Community Input for Library Strategic Planning

The Bellingham Public Library has begun their Strategic Planning process and are interested in gathering the perspectives of the citizens of northern Bellingham, a dense and diverse population with low-income housing and a lack of critical resources, such as food, education, and living space. Through an informal American Library Association Ask Exercise, input was gathered regarding aspirations, needs, and concerns of community members and formed into service recommendations for Bellingham Public Library to better understand the aspirations of this underserved population in an attempt to redevelop services and resources to better support the community’s needs.

TechMentor: Mentorship Management System

We are a mentorship management system that enables organizations such as companies and universities to build meaningful mentorship between their employees/alumni and the tech of tomorrow. Our system handles each step of organizing a mentorship program, right from inviting potential mentors and mentees to signup to matching them using our mentor-mentee matching recommendation system to introducing mentors and mentees to each other and checking in on their progress. The existence of such a platform will help ensure companies can quickly set up their own mentorship programs and make their contribution in giving back to the tech community.

Telling Our Stories: Family Photo Archiving Guide

As part of the Oregon Folklife Network’s “Telling Our Stories” online toolkit for educating the public on how to document, archive, and share their history, I created a how-to guide for archiving and retaining value in historic family photographs, using LIS best practices. The guide covers photo preservation basics, looking for themes to assess, organize, and digitize your collection, and collecting and sharing your stories through photos. The "Telling Our Stories" Family Photo Archiving Guide helps individuals to recognize their own stories and connections to history and the value that individual and collective experiences bring to the cultural heritage landscape.

Tern

We at Tern are committed to providing curated travel tours, making it possible for everyone and anyone to freely explore any destination and serving you a one-stop solution for all of your travel needs. In our user research, we found that aspiring travelers often find brainstorming and logistics planning for travel to be overwhelming. There are too many sources available, such as Google Reviews, Reddit, Yelp, and Airbnb, which do not have the sole purpose of “Detailed Travel Planning.” With our service, travel planning can be more enjoyable and less burdensome.

The Bandit Problem: Are You Winning Enough?

With the use of A/B Testing, two major challenges are faced by the online subscription industry today, i.e., to maximize conversions of trial users while testing product variants and to address ever changing user preferences. This project involves performance evaluation of Multi-armed Bandit Algorithms, as alternatives to conventional A/B testing, that balances exploration and exploitation during the learning process to quickly identify the overall winning feature variant. Contextual Bandit Algorithms are also explored to predict what works best for a given user based on their attributes. This approach helps optimize the conversion rate and support personalization at the user level.

The Emma B. Andrews Diaries: A Digital Humanities Project

The Emma B. Andrews Diary Project consists of 19 volumes of letters and diaries from the Golden Age of Egyptology (1889-1913). Built in Omeka, the website has not been updated since 2013, yet it has accrued a wealth of content. Our project set out to restructure the information architecture, redesign the metadata by creating linked relationships, and edited the custom theme to improve usability.

The Home Project Calendar

Within King County, there are an estimated 12,000 people experiencing homelessness. Over 250 organizations are working to end homelessness in the area, but there is a lack of communication and coordination between them. The Home Project Calendar, an event sharing platform, bridges the gap between these organizations and provides them with one place to share information about their efforts and events around King County. Organizations can share events to increase visibility of their mission to other nonprofits that contribute to their mission. Through information exchange, the Home Project will increase collaboration and alignment in the fight to end homelessness.

The Red Wheelbarrow Digital Literacy Project

Digital illiteracy persists among adults in the coastal Mississippi area the Jackson-George Regional Library System serves. Adults without computer skills cannot use the Internet to gain employment, access government services, or find healthcare providers. Their lack of basic computer skills is a barrier to accessing government programs that can help them. JGRLS does not have the human power to meet this need. A digital literacy program that trains volunteers to teach digital literacy skils to adults using the public computers and broadband capacity at JGRLS' 8 branches is warranted. The project will lay the groundwork for a digital literacy council.

The San Dewayne Francisco Memorial Archives

Challenge: How to preserve and make accessible materials related to a Central Washington University ROTC alumni missing in Vietnam. Materials were housed in copy paper boxes and binders in the ROTC offices. Solution: Housed the materials in Archival quality boxes and folders. Had cadets scan the materials and uploaded the files to the institutional repository at Central Washington University, ScholarWorks. Impact: The information on the institutional repository will enable cadets to research San Dewayne Francisco for their reports. It will also bring greater awareness of missing servicemen, efforts to find their remains, and the need of fundraising for those efforts.

iSchool Capstone

2019