BirdWatch 🦅

BirdWatch is a website that helps students find and analyze "bird courses" (easy courses) by analyzing Reddit discussions using sentiment analysis and natural language processing.

Project Structure

BirdWatch/
├── frontend/           # React + TypeScript frontend
├── backend/
│   ├── data/          # Python data processing scripts
│   └── reddit_api/    # Node.js Reddit API service

Setup Instructions

1. Reddit API Service

# Navigate to the Reddit API directory
cd backend/reddit_api

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Start the API server
npm start

# For development with auto-restart
npm run dev

2. Data Processing Pipeline

# Navigate to the data directory
cd backend/data

# Create and activate virtual environment
python -m venv venv
venv\Scripts\activate  # Windows
source venv/bin/activate  # macOS/Linux

# Install requirements
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Run the pipeline
python pipeline.py

# Run the pipeline with parameters
python pipeline.py --time-period all --limit 300 --analyze-top-courses True --top-courses-count 50

Pipeline Parameters

Parameter	Description	Default	Options
--time-period	Time period to search	year	hour, day, week, month, year, all
--limit	Max threads to fetch	200	Any positive integer
--analyze-top-courses	Analyze top courses	True	Flag
--top-courses-count	Number of top courses	15	Any positive integer

3. Frontend Application

# Navigate to frontend directory
cd frontend

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Start development server
npm run dev

Course Analysis

You can analyze specific courses using:

cd backend/data
python course_details_analyzer.py --course-codes CS101 BU111 PS262 --limit 50

Analysis Parameters

Parameter	Description	Default
--course-codes	Courses to analyze	Required
--limit	Max threads per course	25
--output-dir	Output directory	processed/course_details

Contributing

1. Fork the repository
2. Create your feature branch
3. Commit your changes
4. Push to the branch
5. Open a Pull Request

Tech Stack

• Frontend:

  • React
  • TypeScript
  • Tailwind CSS
  • Vite

• Backend:

  • Node.js
  • Express
  • Python
  • NLTK (Natural Language Processing)
  • VADER Sentiment Analysis

Author

Created by Spencer Kelly