Major
Art
Second Major
Computer Science
Advisor
Brown, David, H
Advisor Department
Computer Science and Statistics
Date
5-2017
Keywords
anonymous, meteor, javascript, art, web development
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.
Comments
This project was a collaboration with Robert Riglietti.