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

Combining Wikidata, SPARQL and R Studio to analyze the citation network of TTRPGs from 1974 to 2021.

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.

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.csv

How the epigraphs are used in TTRPG games. Details here. Détails ici et ici.

- 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.

- 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

Data playing

On this Google Colab, I am exploring and toying with the different sets of data.

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.

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

Informations in the source code are pure facts, therefore they cannot be copyrighted. The curation of these informations, the links between them and the structure of their display are a work of edition. For this reason, I will be glad you aknowledge my name if you want to reuse them.

Metadata / Métadonnées

Author / Auteur : Pascal Martinolli
Created / Créé le : 2019
Most recent version / Dernière version : 2021-03-01
Original format / format de fichier : R script
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. « On the Shoulders of Cloud Giants: citation practices in the tabletop role-playing game publishing industry. » Dataset and R language code. https://github.com/pmartinolli/OtSoCG

https://github.com/pmartinolli/OtSoCG

salgo60/OtSoCG