Poptionary: A Pop-up Dictionary Browser Extension for Language Learners; China, Internet, and Democracy: How the Chinese State Nailed Jello to the Wall 4 views

This undergraduate thesis portfolio integrates a technical capstone project and a Science, Technology, and Society (STS) research paper to examine technology and human barriers. My capstone project examines this topic through the perspective of language barrier through digital language learning. The project, Poptionary, is a browser extension designed to assist and support language learners by making reading and comprehension easier and less disruptive. Poptionary draws on useful features of existing tools and addresses some of their key limitations. Instead of forcing users to switch tabs, copy text, or rely on entire translation, Poptionary uses the advantages of a pop-up dictionary to provide quick in-context dictionary support and pronunciation help, along with features such as translation history and bookmarking. Alongside these features, Poptionary also supports PDFs, a commonly used file format in academic and digital reading environments. My STS research explores this topic by analyzing political and cultural barriers, why early American predictions that the internet would democratize China were so off the. Drawing on STS theory of Co-Production, this paper argues that rather than the internet being an inherently democratizing technology, as the US understood it, the internet’s effects in China were shaped by political institutions, historical experiences, and state priorities. Ultimately, differing political cultures and historical experiences can lead vastly differing understandings to the nature of a technology. Together, these projects highlight the dual role of technology in addressing human barriers. While technology certainly can help break down barriers, the mere ubiquity of a technology does not inevitably resolve systemic difference. Ultimately, technology is a contextualized tool, not a universal fix.

BS (Bachelor of Science)

Internet; Sociotechnical Systems; Barriers

School of Engineering and Applied Science Bachelor of Science in Computer Science Technical Advisor: Mark Sherriff STS Advisor: Travis Elliott Technical Team Members: Kevin Cha, Austin Shi, Andy Zeng

English

All rights reserved by the author (no additional license for public reuse)

2026-05-09