GoodReads: Webscraping and Text Analysis with R (Part 1)

Inspired by this article about sentiment analysis and this guide to webscraping, I have decided to get my hands dirty by scraping and analyzing a sample of reviews on the website Goodreads. The goal of this project is to demonstrate a complete example, going from data collection to machine learning analysis, and to illustrate a few of the dead ends and mistakes I encountered on my journey. We'll be looking at the reviews for five popular romance books. I have voluntarily chosen books in the same genre in order to make comments text more homogeneous a priori; these five books are popular enough that I can easily pull a few thousands reviews for each, yielding a significant corpus with minimum effort. If you don't like romance books, feel free to replicate the analysis with your genre of choice!