Project

The Wandering Inn (TWI) is a webnovel or web serial if you prefer. In fact it's one of the longest you'll find. At the time of this writing, the word count clocks in at over 13 million. For the record, that's over 27 times the length of The Lord of the Rings and almost 3 times the length of The Wheel of Time. Personally I love the story, but I'm not hear to talk about that today. Instead we're going to take a look at a data visualization project I've been working on.

Due to its length, TWI has a vast collection of characters, locations, magical items etc. that are mentioned by name throughout the story. Not only that, the story also includes references to [Classes], [Skills], [Spells] and some other things in brackets. To understand why would require that we delve into the lore a bit, but suffice to say, all these references make up some interesting data points to analyze in terms of their frequency, location on the timeline, and relationships with one another.

TWI Stats is a project that aims to let anyone explore interesting stats related to all the items above via various tables and interactive charts and graphs.

The code can be found at https://github.com/cblanken/wandering-inn-stats

Check out the live deployment at https://twi-stats.cblanken.dev

Warning

At the time of this writing, the application only includes statistics up through volume 9. No chapters of volume 10 have been analyzed yet. During development, the wiki underwent significant changes and development which broke much of the web scraping required to keep the database current with all the characters, [Classes], and [Skills] etc. The wiki data collection modules are currently being refactored to accommodate the new wiki and extract data via the MediaWiki API to be more robust in the future.

Word counts

Of course, we have word counts. Even if they aren't particularly interesting, they're fun to keep track of. That way we can at least compare the length to other works.

Word count by chapter

word count by chapter Current interactive version

Cumulative word count over time

Amazingly, the author's pace hasn't flagged at any point over the last several years of writing.

word count over time Current interactive version

Word counts by book

These books actually refer to the audiobook releases of the serial.

word count by book Current interactive version

Word counts by volume

Volumes are the original demarcation of major plot points of the web serial. As you can see, they keep getting longer 👀.

word count by volume Current interactive version

Mentions

There are several important reference types that warrant tracking mentions. These include:

Characters
[Classes]
[Skills]
[Spells]
[Locations]

Note

There are some other types that would be interesting to track as well, but they're still under development. These will include things like named magical items and monsters.

Here's an example of the chart for the most referenced [Classes].

class mentions Current interactive version

Additionally each of these reference types has a breakdown with a few more charts describing how often they're mentioned across chapters and the chapters with the most references for each type.

For example, the [Mage] class has the following charts.

There are few more stats that are tracked as well, but they're specific to each individual reference type and I won't go into detail here. You can check them out on their respective pages of the application.

Technology

The TWI Stats project is built with the following open source software:

The Django web framework
The Tailwind CSS framework
The Plotly graphing library
A PostgreSQL database

Attributions

Author

A huge thanks to Pirateaba for writing such a wonderful web serial and keeping all the ducks fed for so many years.

Wiki

This project wouldn't be possible without all the awesome folks maintaining the TWI Wiki and tracking the thousands of various characters, [Classes], [Skills] etc.