The gutenbergr package helps you download and process public domain works from the Project Gutenberg collection. This includes both tools for downloading books (and stripping header/footer information), and a complete dataset of Project Gutenberg metadata that can be used to find words of interest. Includes:
gutenberg_download() that downloads one or more works from Project Gutenberg by ID: e.g., gutenberg_download(84) downloads the text of Frankenstein.gutenberg_metadata contains information about each work, pairing Gutenberg ID with title, author, language, etcgutenberg_authors contains information about each author, such as aliases and birth/death yeargutenberg_subjects contains pairings of works with Library of Congress subjects and topicsThis package contains metadata for all Project Gutenberg works as R datasets, so that you can search and filter for particular works before downloading.
The dataset gutenberg_metadata contains information about each work, pairing Gutenberg ID with title, author, language, etc:
library(gutenbergr)
gutenberg_metadata## # A tibble: 51,997 x 8
## gutenberg_id
## <int>
## 1 0
## 2 1
## 3 2
## 4 3
## 5 4
## 6 5
## 7 6
## 8 7
## 9 8
## 10 9
## # ... with 51,987 more rows, and 7 more variables: title <chr>,
## # author <chr>, gutenberg_author_id <int>, language <chr>,
## # gutenberg_bookshelf <chr>, rights <chr>, has_text <lgl>For example, you could find the Gutenberg ID of Wuthering Heights by doing:
library(dplyr)
gutenberg_metadata %>%
filter(title == "Wuthering Heights")## # A tibble: 1 x 8
## gutenberg_id title author gutenberg_author_id
## <int> <chr> <chr> <int>
## 1 768 Wuthering Heights Brontë, Emily 405
## # ... with 4 more variables: language <chr>, gutenberg_bookshelf <chr>,
## # rights <chr>, has_text <lgl>In many analyses, you may want to filter just for English works, avoid duplicates, and include only books that have text that can be downloaded. The gutenberg_works() function does this pre-filtering:
gutenberg_works()## # A tibble: 40,737 x 8
## gutenberg_id
## <int>
## 1 0
## 2 1
## 3 2
## 4 3
## 5 4
## 6 5
## 7 6
## 8 7
## 9 8
## 10 9
## # ... with 40,727 more rows, and 7 more variables: title <chr>,
## # author <chr>, gutenberg_author_id <int>, language <chr>,
## # gutenberg_bookshelf <chr>, rights <chr>, has_text <lgl>It also allows you to perform filtering as an argument:
gutenberg_works(author == "Austen, Jane")## # A tibble: 10 x 8
## gutenberg_id
## <int>
## 1 105
## 2 121
## 3 141
## 4 158
## 5 161
## 6 946
## 7 1212
## 8 1342
## 9 31100
## 10 42078
## # ... with 7 more variables: title <chr>, author <chr>,
## # gutenberg_author_id <int>, language <chr>, gutenberg_bookshelf <chr>,
## # rights <chr>, has_text <lgl># or with a regular expression
library(stringr)
gutenberg_works(str_detect(author, "Austen"))## # A tibble: 13 x 8
## gutenberg_id
## <int>
## 1 105
## 2 121
## 3 141
## 4 158
## 5 161
## 6 946
## 7 1212
## 8 1342
## 9 17797
## 10 31100
## 11 33513
## 12 39897
## 13 42078
## # ... with 7 more variables: title <chr>, author <chr>,
## # gutenberg_author_id <int>, language <chr>, gutenberg_bookshelf <chr>,
## # rights <chr>, has_text <lgl>The meta-data currently in the package was last updated on 05 May 2016.
The function gutenberg_download() downloads one or more works from Project Gutenberg based on their ID. For example, we earlier saw that “Wuthering Heights” has ID 768 (see the URL here), so gutenberg_download(768) downloads this text.
wuthering_heights <- gutenberg_download(768)
wuthering_heights## # A tibble: 12,085 x 2
## gutenberg_id
## <int>
## 1 768
## 2 768
## 3 768
## 4 768
## 5 768
## 6 768
## 7 768
## 8 768
## 9 768
## 10 768
## # ... with 12,075 more rows, and 1 more variables: text <chr>Notice it is returned as a tbl_df (a type of data frame) including two variables: gutenberg_id (useful if multiple books are returned), and a character vector of the text, one row per line. Notice that the header and footer added by Project Gutenberg (visible here) have been stripped away.
Provide a vector of IDs to download multiple books. For example, to download Jane Eyre (book 1260) along with Wuthering Heights, do:
books <- gutenberg_download(c(768, 1260), meta_fields = "title")
books## # A tibble: 32,744 x 3
## gutenberg_id
## <int>
## 1 768
## 2 768
## 3 768
## 4 768
## 5 768
## 6 768
## 7 768
## 8 768
## 9 768
## 10 768
## # ... with 32,734 more rows, and 2 more variables: text <chr>, title <chr>Notice that the meta_fields argument allows us to add one or more additional fields from the gutenberg_metadata to the downloaded text, such as title or author.
books %>%
count(title)## # A tibble: 2 x 2
## title n
## <chr> <int>
## 1 Jane Eyre: An Autobiography 20659
## 2 Wuthering Heights 12085You may want to select books based on information other than their title or author, such as their genre or topic. gutenberg_subjects contains pairings of works with Library of Congress subjects and topics. “lcc” means Library of Congress Classification, while “lcsh” means Library of Congress subject headings:
gutenberg_subjects## # A tibble: 140,173 x 3
## gutenberg_id subject_type
## <int> <chr>
## 1 1 lcc
## 2 1 lcsh
## 3 1 lcsh
## 4 1 lcc
## 5 2 lcc
## 6 2 lcsh
## 7 2 lcsh
## 8 2 lcc
## 9 3 lcsh
## 10 3 lcsh
## # ... with 140,163 more rows, and 1 more variables: subject <chr>This is useful for extracting texts from a particular topic or genre, such as detective stories, or a particular character, such as Sherlock Holmes. The gutenberg_id column can then be used to download these texts or to link with other metadata.
gutenberg_subjects %>%
filter(subject == "Detective and mystery stories")## # A tibble: 521 x 3
## gutenberg_id subject_type subject
## <int> <chr> <chr>
## 1 170 lcsh Detective and mystery stories
## 2 173 lcsh Detective and mystery stories
## 3 244 lcsh Detective and mystery stories
## 4 305 lcsh Detective and mystery stories
## 5 330 lcsh Detective and mystery stories
## 6 481 lcsh Detective and mystery stories
## 7 547 lcsh Detective and mystery stories
## 8 863 lcsh Detective and mystery stories
## 9 905 lcsh Detective and mystery stories
## 10 1155 lcsh Detective and mystery stories
## # ... with 511 more rowsgutenberg_subjects %>%
filter(grepl("Holmes, Sherlock", subject))## # A tibble: 47 x 3
## gutenberg_id subject_type
## <int> <chr>
## 1 108 lcsh
## 2 221 lcsh
## 3 244 lcsh
## 4 834 lcsh
## 5 1661 lcsh
## 6 2097 lcsh
## 7 2343 lcsh
## 8 2344 lcsh
## 9 2345 lcsh
## 10 2346 lcsh
## # ... with 37 more rows, and 1 more variables: subject <chr>gutenberg_authors contains information about each author, such as aliases and birth/death year:
gutenberg_authors## # A tibble: 16,236 x 7
## gutenberg_author_id author
## <int> <chr>
## 1 1 United States
## 2 3 Lincoln, Abraham
## 3 4 Henry, Patrick
## 4 5 Adam, Paul
## 5 7 Carroll, Lewis
## 6 8 United States. Central Intelligence Agency
## 7 9 Melville, Herman
## 8 10 Barrie, J. M. (James Matthew)
## 9 12 Smith, Joseph, Jr.
## 10 14 Madison, James
## # ... with 16,226 more rows, and 5 more variables: alias <chr>,
## # birthdate <int>, deathdate <int>, wikipedia <chr>, aliases <chr>What’s next after retrieving a book’s text? Well, having the book as a data frame is especially useful for working with the tidytext package for text analysis.
library(tidytext)
words <- books %>%
unnest_tokens(word, text)
words## # A tibble: 305,532 x 3
## gutenberg_id title word
## <int> <chr> <chr>
## 1 768 Wuthering Heights wuthering
## 2 768 Wuthering Heights heights
## 3 768 Wuthering Heights chapter
## 4 768 Wuthering Heights i
## 5 768 Wuthering Heights 1801
## 6 768 Wuthering Heights i
## 7 768 Wuthering Heights have
## 8 768 Wuthering Heights just
## 9 768 Wuthering Heights returned
## 10 768 Wuthering Heights from
## # ... with 305,522 more rowsword_counts <- words %>%
anti_join(stop_words, by = "word") %>%
count(title, word, sort = TRUE)
word_counts## # A tibble: 21,201 x 3
## title word n
## <chr> <chr> <int>
## 1 Wuthering Heights heathcliff 421
## 2 Wuthering Heights linton 346
## 3 Jane Eyre: An Autobiography jane 342
## 4 Wuthering Heights catherine 336
## 5 Jane Eyre: An Autobiography rochester 317
## 6 Jane Eyre: An Autobiography sir 315
## 7 Jane Eyre: An Autobiography miss 310
## 8 Jane Eyre: An Autobiography time 244
## 9 Jane Eyre: An Autobiography day 232
## 10 Jane Eyre: An Autobiography looked 221
## # ... with 21,191 more rowsYou may also find these resources useful:
wikipedia column in gutenberg_author to Wikipedia content with the WikipediR package or to pageview statistics with the wikipediatrend packageformat_reverse function for reversing “Last, First” names).