It’s said that popular music is a reflection of society, a barometer for our collective wants, fears, and emotional states. Others are of the belief that music is more a reflection of the artist, a diary that’s been flung from the nightstand drawer into the media frenzy of our modern world. In either case, music can serve as an insight into the human mind in ways that many other mediums cannot.

Join us as we attempt to discover these insights by performing a natural language processing topic analysis on the song lyrics of one of the world’s most popular artists: Taylor Swift.

Tune into our livestream Thursday, November 15th at 1:30pm EDT, where we’ll walk through step by step how to analyze Taylor’s or any of your favorite artist’s lyrics.

In order to follow along with the stream on your own computer, download the song lyric data for one of the artists below and complete the setup instructions before Thursday at 1:30 pm EDT.

Installing Miniconda

This video details how to download and install Miniconda.

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To install Miniconda, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to the Miniconda download page: Miniconda

  2. Select the Python 3.6 installer for your computer’s operating system.

  3. Locate the installer that you downloaded using Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac OS).

  4. Run the installer. Use the following instructions based on your computer’s operating system:

Mac OS:

  1. You may receive a notification about XCode requiring additional component. Click "Install" and enter your password to proceed.

  2. Open your terminal and navigate to the folder where you downloaded the installer. Type the following command in the terminal and press "Return" on your keyboard:

bash miniconda-filename.sh

miniconda-filename.sh is a fictional file name in the example above. Your file name will look something like Miniconda3-latest-MacOSX-x86_64.sh.

3. Follow all instructions in the terminal (you can press Enter as-needed and type yes when necessary).

Windows:

  1. Follow the installation instructions provided by the installer.

Was the Installation Successful?

To test whether your installation was successful (regardless of your computer’s operating system), type the following command into your terminal:

conda list

You should see a list of all the packages that Miniconda installed. If you’re on a computer that uses Windows, you may have to first navigate to the folder where you installed Miniconda for the conda list command to function properly.

Congrats! You now have Miniconda (with Python 3.6) installed on your computer, and you are ready for some data science!

Installing Jupyter

To install Jupyter with Anaconda / Miniconda, enter the following on the command line:

conda install jupyter

You may need to enter y to confirm the install. conda will install Jupyter, an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text.

To learn more about conda, visit the Conda documentation at the following link:

Required Data Science Packages

To make the most of Anaconda / Miniconda in our analysis, you’ll need the following data science packages. Use conda install to install them.

  • pandas
  • nltk
  • scikit-learn
  • matplotlib

For example:

conda install pandas

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