Major

Art

Second Major

Computer Science

Advisor

Brown, David, H

Advisor Department

Computer Science and Statistics

Date

5-2017

Comments

This project was a collaboration with Robert Riglietti.

Keywords

anonymous, meteor, javascript, art, web development

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Abstract

The internet allows modern artists to share their creative works online. Users of art sharing websites are influenced by each other, and if a creative work does not have a lot of views or likes, people tend to assume that the work – or the artist – is bad or unpopular. Consequently, popular artists enjoy a self-reinforcing cycle of increasing visibility, but it is difficult for new artists to gain recognition.

My partner, Rob Riglietti, and I worked to develop a new anonymous web application for artists to share creative works such as art, poems, and photographs. Rob and I designed the app to be anonymous so that users could view and judge the creative works without being influenced by the identity of the creator or by other users. Rather than showing the most popular works on the site’s home page, works with the least exposure – as represented by up- or down-votes – are displayed first. In addition, a work’s cumulative vote total is not shown to visitors until they have voted themselves.

I coded the web application using the JavaScript framework Meteor. Meteor, unlike most traditional web development tools, is a full-stack, reactive framework. Full stack means that a web developer codes both the “front end” (the user’s interface) and the “back end” (the server) together in a unified program. Reactive means that any changes to the application or its data are immediately relayed to all users of the application; the web page updates in real time. Although the app has not been released for public use at the time of this writing, I have greatly increased my web development knowledge through my work on this project.

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