The Guardian has been publishing cryptic crosswords for well over fifty years. During that time, there have been a plethora of different setters, all with their unique style.
Unfortunately, the Guardian only has crosswords going back to the year 1999 on their website. So the analysis can only go that far back.
This repository contains JSON files for all the crosswords the Guardian has hosted.
You can see some graphs of this data here
These charts are updated daily.
Since the crosswords are JSON documents, the backend to storing them is in mongodb. Then, using the the mongodb Perl API, and Template::Toolkit, the static page is generated, and then the charts are rendered client-side via c3js.
The following perl modules are used:
DateTime
DateTime::Format::Duration
List::Util
Module::Pluggable
MongoDB
Sort::Key::DateTime
The chart-rendering namespace is:
Guardian::Cryptic::Crosswords
There's also a Plugins directory, containing the template for each graph.
Patches and ideas for graphs welcome!
-- Thomas Adam