How Philosphers Think

by Puneet Mohan Sangal

While studying about some philosophers, I thought of conducting a sentiment analysis to see which ones thought more positively than others.

Data Collection

I first downloaded some quotes, from a few philosophers I read, from brainyquote. The number of quotes per philosopher varied, as I scraped just the ones from the first search page that showed up.
The quotes can be seen here for Aristotle, Buddha, Chanakya, Confucius, Epicurus, GB Shaw, Heraclitus, Hippocrates, Leibniz, Plato, Vivekanand, Yogananda

Data Analysis

Using R, then, I conducted sentiment analysis. The results were interesting.
results displayed using embedded R code, below, can take a few seconds to display

            negative neutral positive
buddha             3      18        4
chanakya           5      18        2
confucius          3      20        2
epicurus           7      17        1
gbshaw             3      21        1
heraclitus         4      17        3
hippocrates        2      23        1
leibniz            1      14        3
plato             15     123       12
vivekanand         4      17        4
yogananda          0       5        3

Data visualization

Using Chernoff faces, notice the ones that are smiling think more positively
A bar plot shows comparison between each philosopher in a more detailed manner

Shiny App

The whole concept can be seen in my shiny app here If the link does not work, it's due to upload error in shinyapps.io.