Methodology

Overview

Wisdom of Salomon is driven by looking at connections between crossword constructors. Much like the Oracle of Bacon for actors, one can draw a line between crossword constructors by looking at who they've constructed a crossword with.

How It Works

We take our data from Saul Pwanson's metadata. The puzzles.tsv file has everything we need — title, date, venue, and author for crosswords from a wide variety of sources. We are only interested in collaborations, so we look for author fields that contain the word "and" or an ampersand. We then extract the different authors and make a "connection" between them, corresponding to the puzzle. Some data cleanup is necessary at this point, as the same author may be represented with multiple names. We store the list of constructors, puzzles, and connections.

This data is then stored in a graph which allows us to leverage the JSNetworkX library. Getting neighbors is a built-in function, as is using Dijkstra's algorithm to find the shortest connection between any two constructors.

Included Venues

The venues we pull crossword metadata from are the ones from the Pwanson database, which is mostly print. Hopefully more venues will be added later!