Text-backdrop: contextualize any text

29 Oct 2015

Text-backdrop is a tool I developed as my contribution to to Well Versed, a hackathon project that won third place at Hack Dartmouth 2015. Well Versed is a browser extension that, when activated, aggregates all relevant information about the topic of the current web-page and displays it all in a sidebar. Thus, anyone can become well versed about any topic they are perusing–politics, science, etc.

Text-backdrop is the part of the project that analyzes the given source text and gathers additional information. It uses natural language processing techniques to extract relevant information of the text, then it asynchronously queries several APIs (wikipedia, Bing news/images, etc.) to aggregate and return all contextually relevant information in a single JSON document.

Where to find text-backdrop

You can try it out on NPM, or check out the source on github. To play around with it locally, you simply need to npm install text-backdrop and you have it!