Random Historical Conflict Generator

Cover image

For my final I decided to work on one of my initial ideas. A historical conflict generator based on Wikipedia entries.

Conflict generator
Conflict generator

It grabs all the conflict from Wikipedia overview pages ("conflict in 1812"). I used the Wikipedia API to grab all conflicts between 1400 and 2020. I ended up with 14866 different entries. I manually went through them and selected the conflicts starting with words like: "War of the [...]", "Siege of [...]", "Raid on [...]".

By doing so I slimmed it down to 6914 entries and reformatted it in a new JavaScript object. From there on I used the AWS Comprehend entity recognition and replace the entities with the tracery symbol template.

One of the limitations of AWS Comprehend is the limited amount of entitities that can be recognized out of the box. For instance, even a country is recognized as an organization.

From that point onwards I created a Wikipedia clone using Vue and Tracery. Every initialization of the website creates a new historical conflict. A demo can be found here.

One of the goals of the project is to examine how many historical violent conflict are rather exchangeable. Even though the language changes over time – for instance usage of the word Operation only starts in the 20th century – the basic template is very similar.

Link to the presentation.

Link to the GitHub repo

Link to the demo