Data Mining, Knowledge Discovery
MAT 259, 2020
Boning Dong
Concept
I am a game lover, so in this assignment, I want to investigate the popularity of the game-development topics. Also, I want to figure out where to start as a beginner in the game development field. So, I am thinking to find the most popular material from the Seattle Public Library to answer my question.
Query
In the first step, I tried to see the overall trend of the game-development topics. So I used the following SQL query to get the data.
SQL Query 1 I used the following query to count the checkout records related to the game development topic, and group the records in the same year together. So that I can tell the change of popularity over the years. I sorted the resulting data based on years so that I can graph the result to see the trend easily.
For the second query, I tried to figure out what type of media, and which media patrons prefer to borrow. Because as we can see the record in 2020 has no value at this time, so I just filtered it out using YEAR(cout) < 2020. To figure out which one is the most popular one over the years, I tried to sort the result in descending order based on the checkout times.
For the 3rd query, to see the trend of this book over the years, I tried to find the records that match the title and the item type and then sorted them in ascending order based on the years so that I can generate a diagram directly.
SQL Query 1 I used the following query to count the checkout records related to the game development topic, and group the records in the same year together. So that I can tell the change of popularity over the years. I sorted the resulting data based on years so that I can graph the result to see the trend easily.
For the second query, I tried to figure out what type of media, and which media patrons prefer to borrow. Because as we can see the record in 2020 has no value at this time, so I just filtered it out using YEAR(cout) < 2020. To figure out which one is the most popular one over the years, I tried to sort the result in descending order based on the checkout times.
For the 3rd query, to see the trend of this book over the years, I tried to find the records that match the title and the item type and then sorted them in ascending order based on the years so that I can generate a diagram directly.
Final result
Result 1
The query result can be found in the following table of the left, as we can see, just like what I was intending to get, the checkout times of the game-development related topics are grouped by year, and the entries are sorted based on year.
To visualize the trend, I generate the following diagram on the right. Because I don’t have any experience in data visualization, I used Numbers in macOS to generate it for me.
From the diagram, we can tell that starting from 2010 the game development topics are getting more and more popular and reached a peak in 2013. Then it drops and the trend started to increase in 2016. At last, the trend drops because I did this query in Jan 2020, so the record in 2020 is anomaly data.
Result 2
From the result, we can tell the most famous one is a book (based on the itemType “acbk”) called “art of game design a book of lenses”. So I think it’s probably a good choice for my personal use if I want to learn game development.
Result 3
Based on the result, we can tell the popularity did oscillate a little bit over the years, but we can tell the popularity of the book is not dead. Personally, I still think it’s a good book to read to get started with my game development journey.
Report