Assignment 6 Books
Introduction:
For this analysis I am trying to understand the popularity of the books I have recently read by diving into reviews people have left about the books. I selected the books, The Last Thing He Told Me and The Selection. I find this interesting because I know several other people that have read these books and enjoyed them so I wanted to see their overall popularity on a review site.
How to Answer Question:
I intend to answer this question through using the good reads data on this csv. This data is appropriate for my question because it includes ratings, likes, and comments to help understand the overall popularity of the books I chose to review.
Data Transformations:
- Changing the review_rating column to a number and having it only show a the “4” in a 4 out of 5 rating by creating a new column labeled new_rating.
- Filtering reviewer_likes to less than 1,000 to count for outliers and to see the data better.
- Mutating the review date to just show the year rather than the full date format, in a new column called new_date.
Average rating of The Last Thing He Told Me compared to The Selection:
Interpretation: Rating wise, The Last Thing He Told Me seems to be on average rated higher at about 3.4 or 3.5 rating out of 5, whereas The Selection is only ranked on average about 2.7 stars out of 5. Therefore, The Last Thing He Told Me is considered a better book based upon the first pages of good reads reviews.
How Ratings relate to the number of likes someone has:
Interpretation: For The Selection the highest like in the range 1-1,000 was for the lowest rating at 1 out of 5 stars, likely revealing that many people were in agreeance about a negative comment made about this book. For The Last Thing He Told Me, the highest like in the range 1-1,000 was for a higher rating at 4 out of 5 stars. This likely reveals that many people liked a positive comment about that book. This continues to support The Last Thing He Told Me, as a popular book.
Popularity of the two books overtime:
Interpretation: The Last Thing He Told Me seems to be a newer book with the reviews over the last three years averaging between 3.3-4 out of 5 stars. The Selection appears to have been out since 2012 or that’s when the furthest review that is seen. Over the course of eleven years the rating of this book has fluctuated. In 2012 and 2022 the rating were 4.5-5 stars but in 2016 and this year the ratings have been low at about 1 out of 5 stars. As of this year, The Last Thing He Told Me appears to be more popular than The Selection based on ratings.
Book Comments, The Last Thing He Told Me and The Selection Sentiment Analysis:
Interpretation: The Last Thing He Told Me seems to have a more negative sentiment, meaning many of the words used in the comments have a negative connotation, but we know from the average review rating that this may not be accurate. Therefore, this sentiment analysis was not accurate in determining the sentiment toward this book.
Interpretation: The Selection had comments over a period of ten years whereas, it’s negative sentiment count is higher in the negative category and positive category. This could be due to more words in the comments of this book in general. Overall, this sentiment analysis is not accurate to understand the popularity of either book.
Boxplot of Year and Rating by Book:
Interpretation: This visualization shows that The Last Thing He Told Me has on average become increasingly popular this year rating with it having the highest median rating of all the years and only one low outlier. The Selection had the highest median rating in 2022. As of this year, The Last Thing He Told Me, is more popular this year.