Overview

aesopR provides a tidy text corpus of public-domain Aesop’s Fables sourced from the Library of Congress.
The package includes full narrative texts and word-level representations designed to support:

• Text analysis
• Sentiment analysis
• Linguistic exploration
• Teaching demonstrations
• Reproducible NLP workflows

The data are structured in a tidy format, making them immediately compatible with the tidyverse ecosystem.

Installation

You can install from CRAN:

install.packages("aesopR")

Or the development version from Github:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("DavidBrocker/aesopR")

Included Datasets

aesops_fables

A tibble containing 147 public-domain fables with: • fable_id • title • full_text • moral • source_url

library(aesopR)

aesops_fables

aesops_tokens

A tidy, word-level token dataset derived from aesops_fables.

Each row represents a single word token.

aesops_tokens

# Example:

if (requireNamespace("dplyr", quietly = TRUE)) {
  aesops_tokens |>
    dplyr::count(word, sort = TRUE)
}

Pre-Joined Sentiment Datasets

The package also includes sentiment-enriched token datasets using built-in tidytext lexicons: • aesops_afinn • aesops_bing

These datasets allow immediate sentiment exploration without external downloads.

aesops_bing
aesops_afinn

Example Workflow

library(aesopR)
library(dplyr)

# Most frequent words
aesops_tokens |>
  count(word, sort = TRUE) |>
  head(10)

# Sentiment summary using Bing
aesops_bing |>
  count(sentiment)

Data Source

Texts were retrieved from:

Library of Congress https://read.gov/aesop/

All texts are believed to be in the public domain.

Why aesopR?

Many NLP examples rely on song lyrics or copyrighted material. aesopR provides a fully public-domain corpus suitable for:

• Classroom demonstrations

• Methods courses

• Sentiment tutorials

• Research reproducibility

• Package examples

License

MIT © Dave Brocker

Text corpus derived from public-domain sources.