Dumbing of Age - The graph

In 11 years full of dramatic webcomic, a lot of characters have passed through our lives. Loving, hating, playing, mocking... Exactly as our mundane lives. But, in this David M Willis modern-day soap opera, how much are they connected to each other? This graph will help.

Zoom-in inside this image and click on each character to see who interacted with who, and how often!!

Q & A

What's Dumbing of Age?

It's a webcomic, created by David M Willis on September 10th, 2010. You can read it at this link: https://www.dumbingofage.com/

What's a "graph"?

It's a kind of computer drawing that shows nodes (in this case, the characters), and edges, that show the relations between two people. A thicker edge shows that these 2 characters have interacted more often.

How did you make it?

I created a

crawler, a bot that read every page of Dumbing of Age, and read the tag area that shows the names of all the characters that appear on any given page.

Ok, you can make it more geeky...

This page and the crawler were made using javaScript. The crawler loads each page and specific HTML tags are search using cheerio library. After generated nodes and edges into 2 json files, I past these files into this graph, built by vis.js library.

So, it's not a "relationship" graph, but only a counter of how many characters have been shown in each page?

Kind of. But it can be for relationships too, because it's rare for 2 characters to appear in one page and not talk to each other.

That only shows the main characters. There are a lot more.

Yes, but I have to limit the character list to those that appear in at least 7 pages. Showing all the people could make this graph even slower.

Why did you make it?

I love Dumbing of Age, graphs and front-end development. So I wanted to make this work together.

Are you expanding this graph? Can I make a suggestion to you?

Yes, if I have time, I'll improve it, for sure. And yes, you can make your sugestion. I'll hear and do it, if it is possible.
You can even make your edition and open a Pull Request into the repository.

Where can I find this crawler?

You can find it here.

And this page?

It's inside my website's repo, but you can go directly to the page.

Thank notes

Updates

  • v1.1
    • Thank note for user Milu.
    • Fixed some missed classes on style.
    • Inserted links to repository.
    • Raised character threshould to 7.
  • v2.0
    • Graph extended to full page size.
    • Fixed avatar visualization