Religious sentiment

Objective

Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that the framework for this analysis was adapted from a blogpost found on the wonderfully interesting R-bloggers website. The objective of this analysis is to use sentiment analysis on different religious texts to visualise the differences/ similarities between them. This concept is of course fraught with a host of issues. Not least of which being detractors who will likely not endeavour to engage in rational debate against the findings of this work. This is of course beyond the control of the experimental design so I rather focus here on the issue that the translations of the texts used are not modern, and none of them were written (and generally not intended to be read in) English. Therefore a sentiment analysis of these works will be given to a certain amount of inaccuracy because the sentiment database is a recent project and one must assume that the emotions attached to the words in the English language reflect modern sentiment, and not the emotive responses that were necessarily desired at the time of writing/ translation. That being said, the sentiment that these texts would elicit in a reader today (assuming that anyone actually still reads the source material for their faith) would be accurately reflected by the sentiment analysis project and so this issue is arguably a minor one. As a control group (non-religious text), we will be using Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen simply because this has already been ported into R and is readily accesible in the package janeaustenr.