Critical Words

Personal project

Published Jan. 1, 2021

A brief text analysis of the popular D&D live play web series
data visualization
d3.js
Express
MongoDB
Heroku
Highlights
  • Scraped transcripts and wrangled data with R
  • Episode transcripts are stored in a MongoDB databases and queried via an Express app deployed to Heroku
  • Multiple visualization techniques using d3.js

This was a passion project that served as an opportunity to practice setting up an API and learn how to query a custom database in the browser. For those unfamiliar with the series, Critical Role is a live-play D&D show where each episode is typically between three and four hours. This results in a lot of dialogue, all of which is transcribed and put up on the show’s wiki.

This project had three main phases, each of which served as a learning opportunity:

  1. Using R, extract, clean, and wrangle the text data from the wiki into a useable database [Scraper repo]
  2. House that data in a MongoDB database and make it queryable via an Express app hosted on Heroku [API repo]
  3. Visualize the data in a stepper visual essay