Part 49 Case Study: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Speech

We are going to look at Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech found here.

Lets read it in. Since it’s in a .txt file we can use read.table() and specify some things:

speech_txt <- read.table(
  here::here("data", "martin_luther_king_speech.txt"),
  quote = "",
  header = FALSE,
  sep = "\n",
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE
) |> 
  as_tibble() |> 
  rename(line = V1)

49.1 Wrangle our text

49.1.1 unnest_tokens()

Wielding the power of tidytext:

speech_unnest <-
  speech_txt |> 
  unnest_tokens(word, line)

speech_unnest

49.1.2 Remove stop words

speech_unnest <-
  speech_unnest |> 
  anti_join(stop_words, by = "word")

speech_unnest

49.1.3 Count the words

speech_unnest <-
  speech_unnest |> 
  count(word, sort = TRUE)

speech_unnest

49.2 Visualizing the words

speech_unnest |>
  filter(n >= 4) |> # look at words that only occurred 4 or more times
  ggplot() +
  aes(y = n, x = forcats::fct_reorder(word, n, max)) + # sort our bars
  geom_col() +
  coord_flip() + # flip the coords (easier to digest graph)
  labs(y = "word",
       x = "count")

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