About This Plot

This heatmap represents the probability that Goodreads reviews for a given classic would discuss or contain one of the 30 topics on the left. These topics were produced by topic modeling 120,000 Goodreads reviews of classic books.

• Darker tiles indicate a higher probability of containing the topic.
• Lighter tiles indicate a lower probability of containing the topic.

Scanning left-to-right for the “School” topic, for example, reveals that To Kill a Mocking Bird, The Great Gatsby, and The Catcher in the Rye have the darkest tiles in this row, which indicates that reviews of these books are most likely to discuss school-related subjects.

Scanning top-to-bottom for Pride and Prejudice, to take another example, reveals darker tiles for the topics “Audiobooks & Adaptations,” “Marriage,” “Re-Readable,” and “Gushing & Loving Language.”

The topic probabilites have been normalized to highlight differences between the books. We check the significance of these results via 95% bootstrapped confidence intervals, and the majority of visible differences are significant.

You can explore more Goodreads classics data visualizations at https://melaniewalsh.github.io/Goodreads-Classics