Art project: The Periodic Table of Storytelling

Greetings tropers! As the final project for my Visual Design I class, I'm working on a periodic table filled with tropes. I have a couple of questions for the hivemind:

1) Is there a tool that can give me statistics about lists of tropes, e.g. how many wicks and examples each one has? I know I can get wicks from the "Related" page for each one, but an automated tool would speed things up a lot.

2) Which lists of tropes are the most important to represent in such a table? I'll post a copy of the project when I'm done here, of course, but primarily I'm targeting this at people who are completely unfamiliar with TV Tropes. Right now I'm scraping the indexes for Tropes Of Legend, Omnipresent Tropes, and possibly Acceptable Breaks from Reality. If I'm missing anything, please let me know!

I'm pretty sure the tools you mention exist in some form but I forget where they might be.

Hmm...a periodic cable categorizes things by their properties. So in the categories of tropes, you could have the major building blocks of a story. Popularity perhaps should be downplayed in favor of a trope's role in a story: the categories would include plot tropes, setting tropes, character tropes, your media-specific tropes like camera technique for film/tv, interactivity tropes for games, the animation tropes, and so on

If I were doing it, I would not fail to include the tropes of The Hero's Journey and Archetypal Character.

Adding: Oooh! And the two bottom rows seperate from the rest could be Trivia and AudienceReactions, unless you want to keep it to just tropes.

edited 23rd Mar '11 9:41:52 PM by Elle

It's not at all important enough to make the list on merits, but you really ought to include Parodic Table of the Elements for bonus meta points.

Also, this sounds like a neat idea. I'd love to see a link to it when you're done if that's at all possible!

edited 23rd Mar '11 11:05:06 PM by Micah

Thanks for your input, tropers! The project is coming along nicely. I've indexed all the tropes I intend to use and am now compiling the table. Pretty excited about the project; hopefully I'll have an image posted on Monday.

Does anyone know what the total number of tropes on the site is? I just need a ballpark figure. Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?

About 20000. This page overcounts slightly (because it counts translations as separate tropes) but not very much (not very many tropes have been translated).

Tens of thousands, then. Thank ye, sir!

Edit: Here's a partial image◊ of where I am now. The number associated with each block is its popularity in kilowicks.

edited 3rd Apr '11 4:46:17 PM by ComputerSherpa

Give me your index of tropes and I'll run a 'related' search on them all.

Wow, thanks for the offer, Fast Eddie! That's most generous of you, but as it happens I've already compiled the data I need. Next time perhaps I'll PM you in advance and save myself some work.

Will you link your project here once you're done? We'll like to see it.

Definitely!

Does anyone have a high-resolution copy of the blue TV Tropes logo (the one at the top of every page), ideally with ".org" added onto the end of it?

edited 3rd Apr '11 9:45:38 PM by ComputerSherpa

Finished. *wipes forehead* I'll be presenting this in class at noon tomorrow. I wonder, would this make a good page image for Tropes Of Legend? If so, or if anyone has another use for it, you can find a version with a transparent background here.◊

edited 4th Apr '11 3:14:45 AM by ComputerSherpa

The concept sounds like Omnipresent Tropes. Particular tropes on the table may not be, but just standing back and looking at it and I think of Omnipresent Tropes.

I know that this is really late to tel you, but you have "St" as the symbol for both The Storyteller and Subverted Trope. But aside from that tiny little glitch, it's gorgeous, phenomenal work.

Similarly, "C" is both the symbol for Conflict and The Chick. Other than that, though, I really like it.

Thank you for the feedback! I corrected it before printing—now I'll go amend the Web version. Your Wiki Magic is appreciated!

I'm glad it wasn't too late. Hope you get the A+ on it it deserves.

edited 4th Apr '11 12:22:00 PM by Madrugada

Looks cool!

If you're open to doing revisions still...The Wesley and The Scrappy are not Archetypes, they're Audience Reactions. Mary Sue's inclusion there is also debatable.

P.S.: Ditto Jumping the Shark and Growing the Beard

edited 5th Apr '11 11:18:49 PM by Elle

Just got around to reading it - that's very impressive.

You know what would be kind of funny? You know how some elements have symbols that come from their old names? You can used old names for somethings. Like for instance, you've used "Ind" for Adverturer Archaologist and "Neo" for The Chosen One, you could also have "Tb" for Boisterous Bruiser.

But no, no, I'm not going to pick, I'll just go away and make my own.

Now how about a home for this image. Shall we get self-referential on Parodic Table of the Elements? Be functional in the Writer's Toolbox?

Thanks for the suggestions, Elle. I've thought for a couple hours about what would be the best way to change The Wesley and The Scrappy to bring the table more in line with the way TV Tropes categorizes everything. In the end I decided that subjective tropes are all over this puppy, and I can't devote more than a single column to Audience Reactions without totally overhauling the aesthetic structure of the table.

It's unfortunate that I can't make the table match accepted TV Tropes wisdom perfectly. I really wish I had enough room to include more of our well-known tropes and that I could accurately portray the way they all relate to each other, but a perfect diagram of the top tropes wouldn't look like a periodic table, even loosely. So for this project, I'm going to have to keep things the way they are and ask my readers to take this diagram with a big grain of salt and to refer to the authentic source if they need to be sure.

*finally gets the chance to look at the table*

That's brilliant, very well done.

Congrats on the Daily Deviation!

Thank you! This is really exciting. I'm kind of freaked out by all the attention, to be honest.

Some Sort Of Troper, feel free to set this as a page image wherever you want. You can find a version with a transparent background here◊.

Definitely putting a link to it on ImageLinks.Parodic Table Of The Elements.

It almost looks like it could go on a T-shirt or mousepad.