zipf

Zipf's Law Analysis of Popular Texts

https://github.com/haynlyn/zipf

Repository

Zipf's Law Analysis of Popular Texts

README.rst

The ``pyzipf`` package tallies the occurrences of words in text
files and plots each word's rank versus its frequency together
with a line for the theoretical distribution for Zipf's Law.

Motivation
----------

Zipf's Law is often stated as an observational patter in the
relatinoship between the frequency and rank of words in a text:

`"...the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as
often as the second most frequent word,
three times as often as the third most
frequent word, etc."`
- `wikipedia `_

Many books are available to download in plain text format
from sites such as
`Project Gutenberg `_,
so we created this package to qualitatively explore how well
different books align with the word frequencies predicted by
Zipf's Law.

Installation
------------

``pip install pyzipf``

Usage
-----

After installing this package, the following three commands will
be available from the command line

- ``countwords`` for counting the occurrences of words in a text
- ``collate`` for collating multiple word coutn files together
- ``plotcounts`` for visualizing the word counts

A typical usage scenario would include running the following
from your terminal::

    countwords dracula.txt > dracula.csv
    countwords moby_dick.txt > moby_dick.csv
    collate dracula.csv moby_dick.csv > collated.csv
    plotcounts collated.csv --outfile zipf-drac-moby.jpg

Additional information on each function
can be found in their docstrings and appending the ``-h`` flag,
e.g., ``countwords -h``.

Contributing
------------

Interested in contributing?
Check out the CONTRIBUTING.md
file for guidelines on how to contribute.
Please note that this project is released with a
Contributor Code of Conduct (CONDUCT.md).
By contributing to this project,
you agree to abide by its terms.
Both of these files can be found in our
`GitHub repository. `_
# Zipf's Law

These Zipf's Law scripts tally the occurrences of words in text
files and plot each word's rank versus its frequency.

## Contributing

If you would like to find more information about contributing,
please check the CONTRIBUTING.md file in the root directory of
the repository.

## Contributors

- Amira Khan 

Citation (CITATION.md)

# Citation

If you use the pyzipf package for work/research presented in a
publication, we ask that you please cite:

Khan A and Virtanen S, 2020. pyzipf: A Python package for word
count analysis. #Journal of Important Software*, 5(51), 2317,
https://doi.org/10.21105/jois.02317

### BibTeX entry

@article{Khan2020,
    title={pyzipf: A Python package for word count analysis.},
    author={Khan, Amira and Virtanen, Sami},
    journal={Journal of Important Software},
    volume={5},
    number={51},
    eid={2317},
    year={2020},
    doi={10.21105/jois.02317},
    url={https://doi.org/10.21105/jois.02317}
}

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