Happy Saint Patrick’s Day to all of our readers and users out there! Did you know that the first St. Patrick’s Day was held in modern-day Florida, not Ireland? Just some fun trivia as you enter the weekend 🍀
This week was a bit slower than usual at Linguistic, as we have some major changes in the works and weren’t able to get it all launched by end-of-week. That said, let’s take a look at what we did accomplish.
🏠 A new homepage
Astute observers may have noticed that we have changed our homepage (literally something we just launched today!). While we are still operating as a private beta, we are slowly opening up to allow curious passerby to have a peek at what we’re working on. Our new landing page, while still minimalistic, now at least mentions what our product is before you decide to join the waitlist. We like to think Linguistic does a lot more than what our tagline says but, you know, one thing at a time 😉
👨🏻💻 New open-source software
While we are still working out some kinks in our implementation (as well as trying to write a half-decent README), this week we launched some open-source software that produces word frequency lists from the Open Subtitles Dataset and stores them as text (.txt), comma-separated values (.csv) and pickle (.pkl) files. For the nerds out there, we use big-data libraries such as Dask, Pandas and langdetect which is pretty neat.
You can check out the program here!
👀 What’s next
We realized we’re a little light on updates for the week, but only because we are planning a major overhaul of our reader experience.
In our new UI, you’ll be able to:
- Browse different article categories more easily
- View the article you’re reading in a dedicated window
- View the percentage breakdown of words in the article by difficulty
- View the most common words in the article
- Listen to articles on mobile (!!!)
We’re super excited to share it in the coming weeks, so stay tuned 📻