Easily generate a local, up-to-date copy of the Standardized Project Gutenberg Corpus (SPGC).

The Standardized Project Gutenberg Corpus was presented in

A standardized Project Gutenberg corpus for statistical analysis of natural language and quantitative linguistics
M. Gerlach, F. Font-Clos, arXiv:1812.08092, Dec 2018

acompanied by a 'frozen' version of the corpus (SPGC-2018-07-18) as a Zenodo dataset:

SPGC-2018-07-18 contains the tokens/ and counts/ files of all books that were part of Project Gutenbergh (PG) as of Jul 18, 2018, matching exactly those used in the paper. Since then, a few more thousands books have been added to PG, so if you want to exactly reproduce the results of the paper, then you should use SPGC-2018-07-18.

For most other use cases, however, you probably want the latest, most recent version of the corpus, in which case you should use this repository to generate the corpus locally on your computer. In particular, you will need to generate the corpus locally if you need to work with the original full text files in raw/ and text/, since these are not included in the SPGC-2018-07-18 Zenodo dataset.

⚠️ Python 2.x is not supported Please make sure your system runs Python 3.x. (https://pythonclock.org/).

Clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/pgcorpus/gutenberg.git

enter the newly created gutenberg directory

cd gutenberg

To install any missing dependencies, just run

pip install -r requirements.txt

To get a local copy of the PG data, just run

python get_data.py

This will download a copy of all UTF-8 books in PG and will create a csv file with metadata (e.g. author, title, year, ...).

Notice that if you already have some of the data, the program will only download those you are missing (we use rsync for this). It is hence easy to update the dataset periodically to keep it up-to-date by just running get_data.py.

To process all the data in the raw/ directory, run

python process_data.py

This will fill in the text/, tokens/ and counts/ folders.