hacktabl.org

A site to publish cooperative comparison table in Google Doc, using Ethercalc to host the table configuration.

Demo

Basic usage

Example: Doraemon compare table or FEPZ compare table.

• Multiple perspectives (Rows)
• Multiple positions (Columns)
• Showing references for each argument.
• Tooltips over words that needs further explanation.
• Use public Google Doc as the data source so that everyone can edit.
• Label with [some-label-text] at the beginning of each argument.

Table view

Example: FEPZ compare table for agriculture

• Succinct summaries for each table cell so that the table gives a bigger picture for the issue.
• Clicking the table row toggles further arguments for that specific pespective.

Setup a New Hacktabl

To publish a comparison table on hacktabl.org, you need:

1. A Google doc that has a table in its content, and is shared with "anyone with link". Note that you may have to allow anyone to comment in order to make use of the google doc comments.
2. An public webpage that explains the table to new visitors. The page will show up in a modal dialog when an user first visits your table. A published google doc or print URL of Hackpad is sufficient.
3. Come up with a table ID, which makes up the URL of your table.

Visit http://ethercalc.org/<table-id>, you will see an empty spreadsheet. You may copy-paste the following configuration (does not include table header!) to the spreadsheet:

Config	Value	Comments
TITLE		(Title of the table)
DOC_ID		(The URL fragment between https://docs.google.com/document/d/ and /edit of the google doc that contains a table)
INFO_URL		(URL to a introduction webpage)

Fill the 2nd column with the information of your table, then you are good to go. Visit http://hacktabl.org/<table-id> for your new, collaborative comparison table!

Configuration Reference

To see the settings of an existing table, say http://hacktabl.org/<table-id>, just visit http://ethercalc.org/<table-id>. To create a new hacktabl, simply create a new spreadsheet with a desired table ID in EtherCalc.

Required Settings

• TITLE: The title that shows in the title bar and at the top of a table.
• DOC_ID: The ID of the Google Document that contains a table.
• INFO_URL: An url to a web page that provides further information for the readers. It will show up in a popup dialog when the user enters a hacktabl for the first time.

Optional Settings

• TYPE: Whether or not to represent each cell with a short summary so that the entire table looks more succinct. Can be either empty or TABLE. For a running example, please refer to FEPZ comparison table for education and its settings on EtherCalc.
• LABEL_SUMMARY: Use popular labels as summary for each cell. The value can be an integer n, which tells hacktabl to take top n labels from the cell and make up a summary for the cell. Currently only used for TYPE=TABLE tables. Example: Political promises in 2016 Presidential election in Taiwan.
• HIGHLIGHT: Whether or not to enable bold, italic and underlines. Can be either empty or TRUE. For a running example, please refer to Copyright 2014 and its settings on EtherCalc.
• EMPHASIZE_NO_REF: Whether or not to emphasize the arguments with no references. Can be either empty or TRUE. For a running example, please refer to Taipei Mayoral Election and its settings on EtherCalc. Also, for each key-value pairs defined in the EtherCalc, a <meta property="KEY" content="VALUE"> element will be inserted into . Properties like og:image can be set with this technique.

Development

After cloning the repository, please do the following in the repository folder:

npm install

Bower components are included in repository so there's no need to do bower install.

To start development server, please do:

npm start

And open up http://localhost:5000 to see the working website.

When developing parsers, please run unit test using:

npm run test:watch

Deploy to Github Pages

Open up Makefile and make necessary changes to variable GIT and DEPLOY_BRANCH, then execute make deploy.