Wordclouds? - Get outta here. Bobclouds? Now you're talking
A pleasant diversion into the world of Bob Mortimer with {tuber} and {tidytext}
The world’s going to pot.
People who shouldn’t be in charge of jumble sales are in charge of countries, and making a right mess of things.
One way to escape the madness is to immerse yourself into the delightful world of Bob Mortimer, and more specifically, his appearances on the BBC show, ‘Would I Lie To You?’. This is a panel show where contenstants read a statement from a card, which may or may not be true. The other team can then ask questions and then have to decide if the person is telling the truth.
Normally, the stars of the show are David Mitchell and Lee Mack. David’s unremitting cold logic and sarcasm tend to break most participants, while Lee’s quips and comebacks are lightning fast and usually unparalleled.
All that changes when Bob is on the show:
Here’s a list of the statements Bob has had to read out
I strongly urge you to watch them here
I decided it might be a fun idea to look at the sentiments of the comments, which mean getting my head around the {tuber} package. The package is easy to use, but getting set up with Google to use the API was a bit of a hassle, because the process has changed since the tuber documentation was published.
Anyway, I worked my way through it, did a wee bit of tidytexting, and decided to produce these wordclouds, with a twist.
Here is a basic wordcloud, relating to Bob’s ‘Theft and Shrubbery’ tale:
But we can do better.
Behold, the bobcloud:
What’s a bobcloud?
It’s based on the sentiment of the comments (rather than the frequency of the word). Admittedly, it’s a tiny difference, and not exactly earth shattering, but it doesn’t do any harm.
Also, I’m fed up of endless debates about data viz.
“Do what you want” is my new motto.
Getting back to the nonsense, Bob’s owl tale is my favourite of all these clips.
Here is the wordcloud:
bobcloud:
Bob claims he break an apple in half with his bare hands:
Can he? What do you think?
The repo is on github in the usual place in the unlikely event anyone needs to see the code.
