PaperMaps

Using Title Keywords for Visual Exploration of Academic Citation Networks (George's Thesis 2020-2021)

This is an experimental layout intended to help researchers tell better stories of new topics areas they would like to explore, to aid understanding and discovery of related works.

Installation

1. Create a Python virtual environment:

virtualenv -p python3 env

2. Activate the virtual environment:

(The script in env/bin that you run may vary depending on your shell. For sh/bash:)

source env/bin/activate

3. Install Python requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Set up React and dependencies for the website:

cd app
yarn install

Now you're all set to develop!

Running for Development

Just run:

./run.sh

Usage logs by date will appear in logs/.

Deploying to Production

1. Deploy the backend server in app.py.

The quickest (but sloppy) way to do this is to serve it with Flask. This is how it's currently served from the research site at https://papermaps.me. To serve with flask, just run:

FLASK_ENV=development flask run

This will host the backend server at localhost:5000. The research site is set up with nginx to proxy queries from https://papermaps.me/api to localhost:5000.

A better way to do this would be to modify app.py to be deployed as USGI or ASGI and use something like uvicorn to serve it, which will provide production-quality hosting, notably multiple workers instead of the single-threaded debug mode provided by flask run.

2. Build the production version of the website:

First, modify src/constants/Values.js so that API_URL points to the proper location. In development, it should be localhost:5000, but in production, it should be /api.

Then compile the app:

cd app
make

The compiled website will now be in app/build.

3. Serve build/ as a single-page-app.

For https://papermaps.me, this is accomplished using nginx to serve the build/ directory as an SPA. This is done by just routing all queries to / and all 404 errors to build/index.html.

Future Work

• Cleaner layout when there are many keywords
• Indexing and visualizing keywords in abstracts
• Quality-of-life tools, such as paper viewing history, and marking papers as read.

Contents

app/: The React website.

• app/build: Compiled website, ready for deployment to production
• app/src: React Source Code for the website
  • app/src/assets: Website CSS
  • app/src/components: Common modular components employed in the site
  • app/src/constants: Site-wide parameters.
  • app/src/pages: Pages of the website
  • app/src/utils: Common utilities and helpers used across the site
  • app/src/App.js: Main React entrypoint.
  • app/Makefile: Makefile used to build the React app for production.

logs: Usage logs for analysis in post. app.py: The backend server, which handles paper retrieval and provides an LP solver. run.sh: Script to run the backend server and serve the React website, both in development mode.

Contact

George Moe can be contacted after graduation at george@george.moe.