Problem Statement

In the past decade, the internet has exploded in size and relevance in our culture. The internet is a major (and perhaps the main) source of information and media for people today. How can we see what topics and perspectives people have cared about over time? How has the internet shaped what we think about, and vice versa? One option is to explore this idea through reddit.com, “the front page of the internet.”

Approach

We would build a data visualization tool that displays the top, most popular subreddits of a certain time period, such as February 2016 (right now I envision a bubble/web sort of layout). The size of each subreddit on the visualization is directly proportional to its popularity. For each subreddit, the user can click on it to show more information, such as the top posts and comments, number of visitors, etc. Since Reddit has only been around since June 2005, it is feasible to provide a visualization for every month since its founding. Many more features are possibilities as well, such as colors for different categories of topics (politics, science, etc), a list on the side with the top posts for that month, filters for more advanced queries, and superimposing major economical, social, and political events with the timeline.

Audience

This project appeals to the general public and can be of use to scholars as well. Non-scholarly users can use the data visualization to see how the internet has evolved over time, in terms of both size and content. Scholars can use the filters to see how the general public/users of the internet reacted to certain events and analyze the popularity trends of posts and topics.

Skills Needed

This would definitely require front-end skills (HTML, CSS, especially JS and other data viz tools) to make a clean and responsive design. There is a Reddit API that can ideally provide the data for the backend.