On the Shoulders of Cloud Giants: Citation Practices in the Tabletop Role-Playing Game Publishing

Combining Wikidata, SPARQL and R Studio/Javascript to analyze and display of the citation network of TTRPGs from 1974.

Data wrangling in javascript

• UPDATE 2024-02-08 : The dataviz part of the project is currently developed in Javascript on ObservableHQ
• UPDATE 2024-07-10 : Citations among TTRPG blogs in Python & JavaScript

Wikidata

• SPARQL Queries
  • A dozen of SPARQL queries are collected here to extract data from Wikidata in CSV or JSON format.
• Indexing guidelines
  • Some guidelines at WikiProject Board Games about improving TTRPG items.
  • Identifiers
    • In 2019, I asked the creation of the RPGGeek ID (P7226).
    • It would be nice to have an identifier for LeGrog, an awesome French TTRPG database.

Local data on TTRPG

• In the folder \data, you will find some CSV dataset with a stable URL.
• Epigraph data
  • epigraph_data.csv
  • How the epigraphs are used in TTRPG games. Details here.
  • Détails ici et ici.
• Publisher additional data
  • publisher_data.csv
  • I made this table because all Wikidata items (games) aren't indexed with a Publisher property. This data fills partially the void.
• Cease & Desist data
  • ceasendesist_data.csv
  • List of the Cease & Desist affairs I know of. Details here.
  • Détails ici.
  • Maybe there is an impact on the citation practices.

About the project

• Storytelling the project

  • The whole project is loosely explained in my blog
  • Explications épisodiques du projet sur mon blogue en français).

• You can contribute :

  • By improving the data on Wikidata (especially the properties Publisher, Author and RPGGeek ID).
  • By improving the code (for beauty, clarity or structure). The specific details to improve each graphs are documented in the R code.
  • By pushing it on your social media @pascaliensis.

Credits and Acknowledgements

• Yan Holtz for his https://www.r-graph-gallery.com/hierarchical-edge-bundling.html and https://www.data-to-viz.com/graph/edge_bundling.html
• Michael Hahsler and Sudheer Chelluboina for their function map.
• Mikhail Popov for his WikidataQueryServiceR package.
• Hadley et al. for their tidyverse and dplyr packages.
• Thomas Lin Pedersen for his ggraph package.
• Gábor Csárdi et al. for their igraph package.
• Zuguang Gu for his circlize package.
• Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman for the R language.
• The developers of RStudio and the PDF format.
• Caroline Patenaude, data librarian, for her workshops on R Studio.
• Simon Villeneuve, professor, for introducing me to Wikidata.

This content is CC-BY 4.0

Data is CC0. Codes depend on where I find them and their status. As there is a curation and a work of edition, I will be glad you aknowledge my name and link here if you want to reuse them.

Metadata / Métadonnées

• Author / Auteur : Pascal Martinolli

• Created / Créé le : 2019

• Most recent version / Dernière version : 2024-02-09

• Original format / format de fichier : R, Javacript

• License / Licence : CC-BY

• Presented at, promoted through / Présenté à, diffusé via : Twitter

• Commments and collaborations are welcomed at / Commentaires et collaborations bienvenus : pascal.umontreal [at] gmail.com

• How to cite the project in your academic work :

Martinolli, Pascal. 2019-2024. « On the Shoulders of Cloud Giants: citation practices in the tabletop role-playing game publishing. » Dataset and code. https://github.com/pmartinolli/OtSoCG

R dataviz (deprecated)

Datawrangling in R (deprecated)

• Please visit ObservableHQ for more fresh javascript visualisations.
• Graph of the TTRPGs, weighted by citations
  • PDF
  • Code in R
• Chord diagram graph of the publishers
  • PDF
  • Code in R
• Hierarchical edge bundling graph of the TTRPGs
  • PDF
  • Code in R. This code can be reused by providing a dataframe or a table, of any size, structured like : citing | category | cited | category A more simple version of the code can be found here.
• On this Google Colab, I was exploring and toying with the different sets of data.

https://github.com/pmartinolli/OtSoCG