Introduction

This package contains functions that I use for quick and “tidy” text analysis.

Notes

Inspiration

This package is heavily influenced by the blogs of David Robinson and Julia Silge, as well as their co-authored book Text Mining with R. Most of the functions in this package implement snippets of code that they have shared.

Main Functions

The following is a list of all functions in the package.

The following is a list is a list of the main functions in the package. (Not shown: the SE aliases and various helper functions.)

#>  [1] "compute_change"                 "compute_corrs"                 
#>  [3] "compute_freqs"                  "compute_freqs_facet"           
#>  [5] "compute_freqs_facet_by2"        "compute_logratios_facet_by2"   
#>  [7] "compute_logratios_facet_wide"   "compute_sent_summ"             
#>  [9] "compute_sent_summ_facet"        "compute_sentratios_facet_by2"  
#> [11] "compute_tfidf"                  "compute_time_elapsed"          
#> [13] "compute_timefilter"             "compute_timefilter_facet"      
#> [15] "tidify_to_bigrams"              "tidify_to_unigrams"            
#> [17] "trim_bytime"                    "visualize_bigram_freqs"        
#> [19] "visualize_change"               "visualize_cnts"                
#> [21] "visualize_cnts_facet"           "visualize_cnts_wordcloud"      
#> [23] "visualize_cnts_wordcloud_facet" "visualize_corrs_network"       
#> [25] "visualize_freqs_facet_by2"      "visualize_logratios_facet_by2" 
#> [27] "visualize_sentratios_facet_by2" "visualize_tfidf"               
#> [29] "visualize_time"                 "visualize_time_facet"          
#> [31] "visualize_time_hh"

Here are some short descriptions of the functions, grouped generally by usage. Functions are listed in order of recommended use in a script (and in the order in which I wrote them).

Function Idioms

All major functions in this function have non-standard evaluation (NSE) and standard evaluation (SE) versions To distinguish the NSE and SE functions, the dplyr convention of suffixing standard evaluation (SE) functions with _at is used. (These functions expect characters instead of “bare” string to indicate column names.

Main functions used to return data.frames mostly begin with the verb compute. Visualization functions that call these functions internally begin with visualize. There are various default_*() functions (e.g. default_theme(), default_labs(), default_facet()) that are used to specify default arguments in the visualize_*() functions–these arguments end with the noun _base (e.g. theme_base, labs_base, facet_base, etc.). Accompanying these _base arguments are similarly-named _params arguments (e.g. theme_params, labs_params, facet_params, etc.). The intended use of this framework is that the _base arguments, which default to some default_*() function, are not to be altered; instead, this is the purpose of the _params arguments. This design is used as a means of providing “good” defaults while also providing a suitable means of customization.

To explain this format more clearly, consider an example of proper usage of these arguments. In the visualize_cnts() function, there is a theme_base argument set equal to default_theme() by default–this function argument defines a “baseline” theme (very similar to ggplot2::theme_minimal()) that should not be directly changed. To make modifications to the default_theme(), the accompanying theme_params argument should be set equal to a names list corresponding to the appropriate ggplot2::theme() parameters that are to be customized. For example, one might set theme_params = list(legend.title = ggplot2::element_text("Legend Title")). (The default_theme() function sets ggplot::theme(legend.title = ggplot2::element_blank().)

(Notably, the only _base/_params/default_*() combination that does not truly follow this design pattern is that for scale_manual. There is a default_scale_manual() function for a scale_manual_params argument in the visualization function, but no corresponding _base argument.)

Functions to add?

  • model: model_lda(), visualize_lda_betas(), visualize_lda_gammas()
  • poisson: compute_sentdiff_poisson(), prepare_sents_diffs_poisson(), visualize_sents_diffs_poission()

Examples

Check out this blog post analyzing the text in R Weekly posts to see usage of an earlier version of this package:

(Warning: At the time, only SE functions had been implemented. Also, since then, some function names and arguments may have been changed.)

Additionally, see this blog post analyzing personal Google search history to see code that are similar to the code used to implement this package’s functions:

Finally, the tests files can provide worthwhile examples of function usage