Text Mining the FanFiction series Exculpatory Evidence

Text mining is the process of acquiring information from text, whether that is an article on a website or novel. FanFiction is a website, where individuals can write fiction based on an original work of fiction. Exculpatory Evidence are a series of short stories written by DusktoDawn21, an avid Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew fan. The objective of this endeavor is to turn text into data for analysis via a process called natural language processing to generate insights into the short stories and finally state my review on the author’s work.

Word Frequency

The top four words are the first names of the two Hardy boys, Joe and Frank, followed by Callie and Vanessa, who are all the protagonist of the series. Interestingly, the words time and apartment are also used frequently throughout the series. James Obler was found murdered at his apartment which was the center piece where most of the series of events focused around, then the characters never seem to have enough time or just have bad timing.

Bigrams

A bigram is a sequence of two adjencent elements from a string of tokens. In this case our tokens are words taken from the story. he grpah below shows the top 10 bigrams in order of frequency.

The most comon bigram is of the combination Joe and Vanessa, more than Frank and Joe combinations. Joe and Vanessa’s relationship was at the heart of the plot. Interestingly the onomatopoeia of the audio recording, fizz fizzzzz is also common, along with audio clip. The recording served as the preliminary plot evidence of a dark conspiracy.

The author’s use of words to set the tone throughout the story is displayed below in the wordcloud which shows an overall positive tone to the story. This is a perfect segway to look at the text in each chapter to map the sentmient trajectory thoughtout the story.

Sentiment Analysis

Chapter 1

The story opens up with the murder of James Obler in Vanessa Bender’s apartment, both co-workers, with Vanessa deemed a suspect of interest.

Chpaters 2-5

Vanessa enlisted the help of two Private Invetigators, Frank and Joe Hardy, of the detective agency Hardy & Sons. The group mulled over her case eliminating the less likely scenarios and culprits while leaning towards the assumption that Vanessa was likely framed by stakeholders of Ophelia Pharmaceuticals based on the available evidence of a distorted audio recording and Emerson is having an affair.

Chapters 6-8

Here Frank is seeing recovering from his altercation the night before at Obler’s apartment. The gang still mulling over the case with thought of Emerson caovering up and affair by killing James. Emeerson, CEO, was engaged to the daugheter of Opheila Pharmaceutical’s founder, Robert Virtanen. Callie, Franks girlfriend was alone doing an interview with Emerson and a wealthy investor.

Chapters 9-11

Joe and Vanessa recovered copies of exculpotary evidence that operatives of the pharmaceutical company framed Vanessa for James’ murder in order to cover up a report that exposed a significatnly high mortality rate of company’s new drug. Michael Emerson had Vanessa and Joe hostage while Robert Virtanen revealed the motive behind James’ death and his plans to eliminate the Hardy brothers and Vanessa.

Chapters 12-13

The series comes to a close. Callie and the investor Steven Ranella went to have dinner with Robert Virtanen. After receiving a text that Frank and presumably everyone was OK as well as reporting to the Bayport police of their findings, the duo revealed to Rebert that they had shorted is company’s stocks. This would leeave the company bankrupt. The cops later arrived and arrested Robert.

Sentiment Analysis on Main Characters

My favorite character in the series.

Michael Emerson, despite being one fo the main antagonists in the series, didn’t show as many negtaive words preceding his name as depicted in the chart above according to the data . Using the AFINN lexicon we could not locate any sentiment around Robert Virtanen, which is interesing since it turned out he was the Big Bad or arc villain of the story. He was the cause of all the bad things that happened. This could be due to both men relying on hired help to do the actual dirty work on their behalf.

Not sure if it was the author’s intention but the words preceding the character Callie gave a negative tone based on the lexicon used for measurement. I personally am indifferent to this character there was nothing great that stood out, unlike Vanessa where there was more depth, she served a more supporting role for the story. Joe and Vanessa’s relationship were a nice touch and you can see the data show’s a positive tone around both.

Network Analysis

There are four main clusters in the network graph above: Frank, Joe, Callie, and Vanessa. All four worked together to crack the case and played an integral part in bringning down the culprits behind James’ murder. The apartment cluster stands out due to James Obler was found dead at Vanessa’s apartment and Frank got beat up near Obler’s apartment.

Conclusion

I thought this new take on the Hardy Boys world was refreshing. I didn’t have any emotional connection with Callie then I did with Vanessa and I thought the development of Vanessa was done well, though at the expense of Callie. DusktoDawn21 did a marvelous job and I hope to read more of the author’s work in the near future. I’m an avid fan!