Worksheet 1: Handling Novel Full-Texts

In this worksheet we are going to work with the full-text of a novel. To begin, we will focus on Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

For this novel, the file fulltext.txt contains an annotated version of the original text of the novel as provided on Project Gutenberg.

# import the Python packages that we will need to use later on
import re
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# the relevant files for this novel are stored in the directory below
from pathlib import Path
dir_pride = Path("data") / "pride_prejudice"

Task 1: Loading Text

Firstly, read the entire novel into a list of lines of text. Display the total number of lines in the novel.

How many lines of text in the novel full-text are not empty (i.e. containing non-whitespace symbols)?

Task 2: Splitting Chapters

Next, iterate over the lines of text from above to split the novel by chapter. Store the non-empty lines for each chapter in a separate list. Display the number of chapters that you found.

(Hint: The first line of each chapter has the format 'CHAPTER 1', 'CHAPTER 2' etc. A regular expression could be used to find lines matching this pattern.)

Using the lists you created above, now create a list containing the count of lines per chapter.

Use this to calculate the average number of lines per chapter in the novel.

Using the counts that you created above, create a line plot which shows the total number of lines in each chapter in the novel.

Bonus Task: Comparing Full-Texts

Next, we expand the process above to consider the full-texts for all the novels in our dataset:

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

2. Dracula by Bram Stoker

3. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

# the relevant files for these novels are stored in the paths below
dir_pride = Path("data") / "pride_prejudice"
dir_dracula = Path("data") / "dracula"
dir_frankenstein = Path("data") / "frankenstein"

Load the full-text file for each novel and find the number of non-empty lines in each case.

Visualise the line counts from above using a bar chart.