Vis in the Wild — Oreos and the Art of Crossword Puzzle Construction Analysis

I'm analyzing the visualizations in Oreos and the Art of Crossword Puzzle Construction an interactive story by Russell Samora for The Pudding. Specifically I'll be looking at the visualizations found in Level 3.

Purpose

These visualizations are intended to explain first and foremost the somewhat bizarre clue in a 2020 USA Today crossword "Cookie that some people eat with mustard" for Oreo, but also why the word is so popular in crosswords and why crossword constructors have to go to such extreme lengths to keep cluing the word in new and interesting ways.

The Data

The data that primarily powers the visualizations in this piece come from a database of crossword clues from over 90,000 grids from a whole host of different publications.

These data were compiled by automatically downloading and parsing crosswords daily from each of the source publications.

Users

The users of these visualizations are simply the readers of the article. It is assumed that they are at least familiar with the concept of crossword puzzles, but the story portion does a great job of explaining any of the important context needed to understand the visualizations themselves.

For example they include the following text and visualization to explain the prevalence of words like Oreo in the crossword.

Questions and Insights

There are many questions that a user can answer using these visualizations. Using what is probably my favorite of the visualizations, you can answer the question of when different words were first used to clue Oreo. You can slide through the years and see each of the new words used in clues and what the full clue in which each word made its debut.

From this I can for example, see that the first time the word favorite was used to clue Oreo was in 1998 and the full clue was "Cookie favorite".

Another cool interactive visual that provides an interesting insight is the interactive probability permutation grid.

This visualization helps the user understand with the use of numbers and probabilities how Oreo is disproportionately used compared to the actual most probable or common answers.

It helps illustrate why Oreo is such useful fill when the user can see an entire grid and the actual restrictions that come with puzzle construction.

Design Choices

I overall really like most of the design choices in these visualizations. I think they are by and large effective. They are clean and minimal. The almost slideshow-like format really highlights what is important at any given time and enables the user to focus on just that important information without the distraction of previous visualizations and/or text.

The one criticism I have is of the letter frequency visualization.

I very much appreciate the detail-on-demand feature of highlighting the current letter as you hover over it and showing the actual percent frequency. The problem I have with it is for some reason they give you a crosshair mouse pointer.

This makes me at least think I should be able to drag to make a rectangular selection of some kind. Maybe I'm alone here, but I suspect others would expect the same.

Limitations

Really all the limitations of this type of visualization stem from the fact that they are being used to tell a specific story. In this case about the word Oreo.

Perhaps a user may wish to explore some of the other frequently used words in a similar manner. These visualizations do not allow for that.