Do you believe in equal opportunities for all genders? Do you want to challenge yourself with a different genre outside of the typical fields of academia?  This is the project for you. You don’t have to be a wrestling enthusiast to be part of this project. This project focuses on exposing the issue of gender disparity in professional wrestling through data visualizations. Gender disparity is evident in many fields and is still an issue today. However, the field of professional wrestling is rarely discussed on the subject of gender disparity, much less information and data available on it. Get in on the ground floor to a project, and you can cement your name into the foundation. Thanks for your time. Any questions can be asked in the comment section or by email.

Abstract

Over the decades, professional wrestling has entertained billions of people via television, radio, the internet, and other media. Though how audiences consume professional wrestling has changed, the lack of female matches in wrestling events is evident if one is to look at the event cards. This project aims to examine professional wrestling through the available digital humanities data visualization method to reveal and analyze the disparity between genders in professional wrestling, in which males have more matches than females over the decades. Data will be gathered from the Cagematch.net website. Cagematch.net is a website that serves as a database for professional wrestling information. It includes match results, ratings, and other information about wrestling events worldwide, and this data will be used to create interactive data visualizations on Tableau and publish this information and findings on WordPress. The disparity explored in this project will show that despite the inclusion of more female wrestlers in professional wrestling, they still perform fewer matches than male wrestlers on average.

By viewing and extracting the final event of each year from 1934 to 2024, which took place in Madison Square Garden, we can examine the overall difference between genders in the world of professional wrestling through Tableau and WordPress to display how much the inclusion of female wrestlers over the years has barely improved. By creating an interactive data visualization, I will make it possible for website visitors and fans of professional wrestling to reach their conclusions about this gender disparity. More academic-based research on professional wrestling needs to be conducted compared to other forms of entertainment to explore these disparities. In an industry that is overlooked and seen as mock combat, this project will use digital humanities tools and collaboration to expose gender disparity, starting with ninety events that took place over ninety years in New York City.

Work Plan

The first steps of this project fall on the project manager, who will be responsible for extracting the data from each year and inputting it in Excel to allow the Data Viz expert to create an interactive table, charts, or graphs that will enable viewers to use the data we have provided to make their own conclusions. The data for this project will be gathered from Cagematch.net, the largest wrestling internet database. Cagematch.net was founded on the 15th of March, 2001, by the trio of Philip Kreikenbohm, Nicolas Pape, and Knut Linke. The site started as a traditional combination of a wrestling news site and a discussion forum (the “Cageboard”), as they had some experience with this format, which was pretty popular then. Cagematch.net officially opened the site to the public on the 1st of June, 2001, with a team of about 20+ people working on the discussion forum and posting news from around the wrestling world. In 2007, they revolutionized the wrestling internet by establishing the first internet wrestling database and creating the rating system, which allowed thousands of wrestling fans to rate their favorite wrestlers, events, matches, etc. In total, over a hundred people have helped make Cagematch.net a success. Currently, they have over 30 voluntary team members working to keep the database up-to-date and fill in the gaps in history that are not yet covered. The website has data from each wrestling event in Madison Square Garden from the 1930s to 2024. Data is crucial in digital humanities as it allows multiple tools to be used to create a project such as this one. The data used for this project will be as unbiased as possible by not specifically choosing a promotion or random dates. The data from each year will be needed for the last event that took place at Madison Square Garden, which is likely to always be in December.

This yearly wrestling data also allows a more manageable workload to be used, and it will not impede other staff as we are focusing on just one month, once a year, for 90 years compared to twice a year or each month of every year. The data required for each yearly selected event will consist of how many matches took place, how many were men’s matches, how many were women’s matches, the date/year, how many men performed, how many women performed, broadcast type, name of event, and name of promotion. The best thing about cagematch.net is that it provides all this information, and although it may need to be manually extracted into an Excel file, no one will need to sit through all these matches and watch them. Lastly, the project manager is responsible for tidying the data as it is a critical problem to ensure it is clean and accurate.

During the same time frame as data extraction, which should be about two weeks, the Data Viz expert will focus on the best methods and tables used for this data. Thus, the Data Viz expert will be required to present handwritten and hand-drawn rough drafts of how this data will look by just looking at the data that will be extracted. In this case, after the first ten years of data have been extracted, it is the project manager’s responsibility to send that small amount of data to the Data Viz expert to allow them to see what the rest of the data will look like and allow them to use that data to begin designing the visualizations. During the initial stages, the web designer on WordPress will need to commence creating the site and sending invitations for administrative rights to the other staff members. When the site is opened, the web designer must send a hand drawing or screenshot of how they see the site and what it should look like for the project, allowing an earlier insight into how and what links will be available for others.

Less than halfway through the semester, about week five/six, the data extraction for each year of wrestling in Madison Square Garden should have already been filled in Excel and submitted to the Tableau expert to begin creating their tables, graphs, etc. At this point, the lead project manager will work closely with each staff member to ensure that all appropriate data on Tableau and WordPress are moving in the right direction from the project’s initial vision. The Data Viz expert should have at least three to four kinds of data visualizations by the end of the project. Still, only three will be used, and at least one must be submitted weekly so the web designer can attach the Tableau data to WordPress. Each data visualization presented will require a summary of what the data means and what can be learned. One staff member is responsible for writing an overview of how to use the data visualization so that the Web Designer can include it in WordPress.

Following these steps, the copy editors must adequately check all the information on the data, Tableau, WordPress, and white paper to ensure everything is correct and accurate. The copy editors will be all three staff members, making the next step essential. Throughout the semester, the copy editor must submit a weekly summary of what they have adjusted or fixed for their part in the project and what they need from other members to progress. Thus, this will allow everyone to double-check their work in the future and allow for communication between staff members on what is missing or needs attention.

In the last weeks, all staff members must complete each task and submit any last-minute changes before presenting the final product. The project manager must check the data correctly; the Data Viz expert must check if their visualizations are all working fluidly; the web designer must check if there are any broken URLs, if the page has public accessibility, etc. Suppose any team member is unwell or needs help to do work for a particular week. In that case, it is always possible to continue the following week, or if help in any way or form is needed, the project manager should be notified, and proper time will be given to allow us to finish any work that needs to be done. All of this is doable in one semester the way it is planned out.

List of Participants

• Project Lead, Outreach, and Data Extraction/Entry: Martin Bueno
• Excel/Data Visualization (Data Viz) Expert/Outreach(Flexible): OPEN
• Web Designer/Developer for WordPress: OPEN
• Researcher/Documentation/Copy Editors: OPEN

Endgame

The final product of this project should be a WordPress site with links to three different data visualizations that depict the disparity of genders in professional wrestling matches throughout the years in New York City. The website will be distributed online within wrestling communities such as Reddit and BlueSky so that others can look at this data and have a different perspective about how there is still an inequality gap in almost 90 years of including women in professional wrestling. Moreover, other communities may also want to examine how the disparity is reminiscent of different sports. The project lead will also disseminate the website in person at local wrestling shows within the tri-state area. Our project will include our findings about gender disparity. However, it is crucial to allow visitors to the website to make their own conclusions by interacting with the data visualizations created for this project. Though more data can be included in this project, there are limitations and considerations to other staff members who may need adequate time to balance workloads from other academic projects, personal lives, and employment. Though my project proposal may be small in scale from its initial stages, it aims to keep building on the findings. This continuation may include the use of other digital humanities tools that can further ground itself in both academia and the sport of professional wrestling.