https://github.com/jtanwk/nytcrossword

An exploration of New York Times crossword answers from 1994-2017, i.e. the Will Shortz era.
https://github.com/jtanwk/nytcrossword

crosswords dataviz linguistic-analysis nytimes nytimes-crossword rvest webscraping

Last synced: 9 days ago
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An exploration of New York Times crossword answers from 1994-2017, i.e. the Will Shortz era.

• Host: GitHub
• URL: https://github.com/jtanwk/nytcrossword
• Owner: jtanwk
• License: mit
• Created: 2017-09-03T06:51:53.000Z (almost 7 years ago)
• Default Branch: master
• Last Pushed: 2019-02-20T05:33:29.000Z (over 5 years ago)
• Last Synced: 2024-03-09T04:35:25.681Z (4 months ago)
• Topics: crosswords, dataviz, linguistic-analysis, nytimes, nytimes-crossword, rvest, webscraping
• Language: HTML
• Homepage: https://jtanwk.github.io/nytcrossword/
• Size: 7.43 MB
• Stars: 122
• Watchers: 5
• Forks: 8
• Open Issues: 0
• Metadata Files:
  • Readme: README.md
  • License: LICENSE

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• awesome-stars - jtanwk/nytcrossword - An exploration of New York Times crossword answers from 1994-2017, i.e. the Will Shortz era. (HTML)

README

        
# 24 Years of NYTimes Crossword answers

September 2, 2017

[View the notebook here](https://jtanwk.github.io/nytcrossword/)

## Description

Exploratory data analysis of 24 years of New York Times Crossword answers. I use data visualization and computational linguistics concepts to discover trends in the Shortz-era puzzles (1994 - present).

Questions include:

-   What are the most common answers?

-   Are words getting longer? Shorter?

-   How does puzzle letter density vary by day?

-   What words have emerged in the crossword only in the past few years?

-   How lexically diverse are the puzzles?

## Dependencies

-   `tidyverse` for everything

-   `plyr` for data wrangling

-   `here` for OS-agnostic file paths

-   `tidytext` for text analysis methods

-   `stringr` for string-manipulation operations

-   `viridis` for a simple, colorblind-friendly palette

## Data Sources

The original dataset for this project was scraped from XWordInfo.com. Upon their request, however, I have taken down my scraper code and removed the dataset from this repository. [Read the notebook for more details](https://jtanwk.github.io/nytcrossword/).