MFADT Thesis

Round is a chrome extension that gives feedback on existing news reading habits in order to expose areas that you might be missing out on. Round focuses on self-quantification as a metric for reflection and impetus for discovery and betterment.

The goal of Round is to help you learn more about your personal browsing tendencies in order to prompt change in areas that you find deficient. Notice that you only read tech articles and aren’t informed on the current political situation? Round will help you realize that through data visualization and can give recommendations on articles in that area.

This focus on the quantified self as a means for change stems from a desire to prompt change from within instead of forcing it. By letting users recognize their deficiencies on their own they can become their own means for change as desired.

Project Architecture

1. User browses the news, chrome extension activates when an article page is opened.
2. Using an injected content script, the extension retrieves the article metadata and saves it to local storage.
3. Users can open the popup to see a personalized visualization about their reading habits.
4. To get recommendations, the popup makes a call to the topic-specific RSS feeds and returns the most recently published articles.