What do Goodreads users talk about in their reviews of “classic” books?
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
You can hover over each tile to see more information, including the words from the Goodreads reviews that make up each “topic” (e.g., “School” = “school”, “high”, “class”, “english”).
More About This Plot
To read this plot, it can be helpful to consider a few examples. If you scan left-to-right for the “School” topic, you will see 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.
If you scan top-to-bottom for Pride and Prejudice, to take another example, you will see that the novel has darker tiles for the topics “Audiobooks & Adaptations,” “Marriage,” “Re-Readable,” and “Gushing & Loving Language.”
The topic probabilities 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 a standalone version of this plot here.
This plot was created with the JavaScript data visualization library d3. The code was inspired by and partly borrowed from Yan Holtz.