Beagle
PDF Annotator & Chrome Extension
Developer 2014-2016
Collaborators: Adam Marblestone, Ed Boyden from the Synthetic Neurobiology research group at the MIT Media Lab; Juan Benet of IPFS.
Scientists spend a lot of time researching, but little of that knowledge ends up in the publication pipeline; by building a system to capture, understand, and share lost data, we can facilitate science as a whole. The idea behind Beagle is that a good PDF Annotator in a minimally-intrusive system (in this case, a Chrome Extension) would allow for data to be shared easier between labs working on specific projects. I was the sole developer contracted on this project for 8 months, using Open Annotator, PDF.js, React, browserify, MongoDB, and other pretty sweet tools to build it out. The project is currently in hiatus while I pursue other projects, although we do have plans to continue it in the future.
The name is from the HMS Beagle, the ship that Charles Darwin used to sail to the Galapagos, and on which he made his revolutionary discoveries.
