My parents and grandparents used to read the obituary section of the newspaper everyday. They would discuss the people who they knew or knew of, send condolences to the next of kin, and make plans to go to the funeral. Have you ever been scrolling mindlessly through Facebook only to discover that someone you know died? It is shocking and traumatic. Death notifications don't belong interspersed amongst the nonsense of social media. They belong on their own platform; one that is built with the dignity of the deceased in mind. Obituary Hub will be a social platform built to pay respect to the deceased, celebrate their lives, send condolences to the next of kin, and where those interested in contemplating death and impermanence can go to read obituaries.
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What features will your app include?
- A brief history of obituaries
- A collection of obituaries both recently published and from long ago, including interesting historical documents
- Contact information for the next of kin to send condolences for recent deaths
- A collection of links to apps you can use to send flowers, meals, etc. to the next of kin
- Best of collection, consisting of interesting obituaries from the past that are voted on by users
- Submission link to add obits to database (will need to be verified through link to publication in local newspaper, etc.)
- Sort by year of death, year of birth, veteran status, religious affiliation(?), career title/industry
- Can view birth/death locations on a map
- A designated section for obits of people who died from COVID, to humanize the numbers
- There are many newspaper articles with collections of obituaries of people who died of COVID-19 from around the world.
- Web scraping: visit these websites and collect their data. Could be a microservice built in python.
- Visualize data using dj3s (Histogram)
- Utilize sentiment analyzer to collect obituaries by themes (create as a microservice)
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Which APIs will you use?
- NYTimes
- they have special collections of obits including victims of COVID-19 and Sept.11th
- Obituarydata.com
- US National Archives
- great source of interesting historical documents
- MapBox (for creating custom maps)
- Find a grave API (Scrape-A-Grave)
- NYTimes
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Which OAuth integration are you planning to use?
- TBD; anyone will be able to view, but they must become a member in order to upload
- Definitely solving a problem of social media not being the appropriate place to find out people have passed away.
- obituary data is not accessible in one place (for free). Especially for COVID, it is printed in various newspapers but not all compiled together.
- Making this data accessible for people with all types of technical abilities. Elderly people would definitely get value from this, and to make sure it is easy for them to use.
- people want to be a part of the social grieving but not necessarily do it on facebook. Give people who aren't on facebook the opportunity to read tributes and post memories, pictures, etc.
- sharing out information on when memorial services will be held
- opportunity to send flowers, not only to family or for funeral service, but to be deposited at the cemetary if they passed away previously (map for cemetaries?)
- connecting to a lot of APIs
- topic in itself is interesting
- COVID specific category (highlight these respectfully, remembering that no matter the cause of death everyone matters)
- very respectful ux and ui (catering to the elderly, or at least not ignoring their needs and skill)
- newspaper font, with large print
- Finding the APIs
- The magnitutde is definitely huge, and we need to be realistic about demonstrating what this can be
- Are we linking up with facebook? Will be people misuse this and write terrible things and we will need to censor?
- users can upload obituaries for their loved ones if it isn't something that is included
- web scraping microservice