Okay, let’s talk about the “james avery corpus” thing. Honestly, I didn’t even know what a “corpus” was until yesterday. Sounds fancy, right? Turns out, it’s just a big collection of text. And “James Avery” is a jewelry store. But it is not any jewelry store, it is the one that my grandma and my mom love the most! I guess I was trying to do something with all the text about their stuff.
So, here’s what happened. First, I figured I needed to grab all the text I could find about them online. I went to their official website and looked at product page after product page. I copied all the stuff, all their product descriptions, the details, even the customer reviews. Pasted them into a huge text file. It was a ton of work, felt like it took forever.
Next, I tried to clean up the mess. This meant getting rid of all the extra spaces, weird formatting, and those annoying HTML tags that were still hanging around in the text file. I used some basic text editor features like “find and replace” to do this. Replaced them with nothing, deleted them, one by one. After that, I started to deal with some of the punctuations. I decided to remove some of them.
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Removed all the exclamation marks. Don’t need that much excitement in my data.
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Got rid of the question marks. I don’t think there were actually that many questions anyway.
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Kept the periods, though. Those are important to separate sentences.
After I removed those punctuations, I lowercased every word in my file. It will make it easier when I search them later.
Then came the fun part – trying to understand what I had. The first thing I did was count how many times each word showed up. My little text editor can do that, and it was kind of cool to see which words were the most popular. “Charm”, “silver”, and “gold” were up there, which made sense since they sell jewelry.
I also wanted to see which words tend to hang out together. This is a little tricky, but basically, I looked at pairs of words that appeared next to each other a lot. “Sterling silver” was a big one, of course. That got me thinking about maybe trying to find phrases instead of just single words.
But, I’m still figuring all this out. I tried to use some online tools that are supposed to do fancy analysis on text, but most of them wanted me to pay, or they were too complicated for me.
What did I find?
Honestly, not much yet. I can see the words they use a lot and some common phrases. I was hoping to get some insights, like maybe what their customers like the most, or how their product descriptions are different from other jewelry stores, but I’m still digging. It is definitely not easy.
But it’s been a good learning experience. I had to find ways to get the text, clean it up, and try to make sense of it. It is just the first step. I think I will read more about this and try again later. Maybe there’s a simpler way to do all this. And maybe I should talk to my mom and grandma. Get some real-world insights from them. It is their favorite store after all.
