DRAG QUEENS
It’s no secret, I am a Drag Race super fan. My objective for this project was to create a comprehensive repository of information about RuPaul’s Drag Race and related franchises. I created an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD), outlining how different entities connect to each other (e.g. a Franchise can have many Seasons, a Season has Contestants and Episodes). Then I produced R scripts to scrape and collect the outlined information. There are a total of 9 tables. To-date, the repository contains information on 12 different drag race franchises and 370+ contestants.
Scraping & Pre-Processing
The majority of data for this project was collected using an R web scraping library, rvest (equivalent of Python’s Beautiful Soup). Data was scraped from Wikipedia & RuPaul’s FanWiki.
Data collected was then normalized and reshaped using additional R libraries (namely tidyverse).
Data encompasses RuPaul’s Drag Race, All Stars, and all International franchises (e.g. Canda’s Drag Race). For seasons still in progress or not yet aired, there may be incongruencies in table information - e.g. season contestants are present, but episode outcomes are not.
Where Are You Queen?
Where are the queens originally from? I used tidygeocoder to produce the geo coordinates for each hometown, and used leafletR (Leaflet wrapper) to generate the map. It's pretty cool to see how Ru's family footprint has expanded around the world over the past decade. You can find a queen in almost every continent!
The interactive version available here.
CUSTOM PLAYLIST
I plugged the collection of lip sync songs into Spotify’s API service to get each song’s Spotify Track ID and related track information (e.g. audio features). Before digging into some EDA, I wanted to create my own RuPaul’s Lip Sync playlist. With the Spotify API, users are able to generate their own playlists by passing track IDs and the target playlist ID. This saved a TON of time, in a matter of seconds I had 300+ songs and 20hrs worth of lip sync songs in my very own playlist.
SONGS BY DECADE
With a new dataset of song information, I wanted to see the distribution of lip sync songs by album decade. I had a sneaky feeling Ru favored songs from the 80’s. I added some additional details like most featured artist per decade and important milestone notes to generate what I’d call a “timeline bar graph.” No surprise, RuPaul is also one of the top artists - many songs from his Supermodel of The World and succeeding albums are used as lip sync tracks.
