Running head: THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 1

The Analytics of Near-Death Experiences:

Applying the Data Science Method to

the Study of Near-Death Experiences

A Capstone Research Project

Alwin J. Bethel

Texas Woman’s University

Under the Direction of Dr. Jian Zhang

CSCI 5923.02: Capstone in Informatics

THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ............................................................................................................................................3
Introduction ......................................................................................................................................4
Background ..................................................................................................................................4
Problem Statement .......................................................................................................................4
Purpose of Study ..........................................................................................................................4
Literature Review.............................................................................................................................5
The Precedent ...............................................................................................................................5
The Data Fluency Problem ...........................................................................................................7
Methodology ..................................................................................................................................10
Phase 1. Web Scraping & Data Collection ................................................................................11
Phase 2. Preparing the Model, Text Mining, & Integrating Natural Language Processing .......12
Phase 3: Experimentation: Introduction of New Data ...............................................................13
Evaluation: Inspecting the Precedent & Limitations of this Project ..........................................15
Evaluation: Implementing the Data Science Method as a Solution (Theoretical) .....................15
Experimental Findings, Evaluating Error, & Future Improvements..............................................16
Conclusion, Limitations, Interpretation, & Recommendation .......................................................19
Conclusion & Limitations ..........................................................................................................19
Interpretation ..............................................................................................................................20
Recommendations ......................................................................................................................21
References ......................................................................................................................................20
Appendix ........................................................................................................................................22
THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 3

Abstract

The first recorded recognition of near-death experiences (NDEs) traverses history to the times of

Plato, and is acknowledged in his work “The Myth of Er” (IANDS, 2017). However, today the

study of near-death experiences is relegated as a quasi-science and categorized into the field of

metaphysics. When almost 19 million Americans, since 1992, have had a near-death experience

is it prudent or wise to consider near-death experiences anecdotal or consign the field as pseudo-

scientific (NDERF, n.d.)? My interest in near-death studies began with an unintentional click on

a YouTube video containing a personal NDE account in December 2017. Unbeknownst to me

this click would burgeon an interest into a passion. Recently, a heated argument with a friend

pushed my interested further and I began defending the knowledge I gained over the past

months. My intention to apply the knowledge and skills I have gained in the Master of

Informatics program at Texas Woman’s University to this project is grounded in both my

personal interest in the subject, but additionally due to the profound lack of meaningful analytics

to the agglomeration of transcribed near-death experiences, prevalent today. I intend to mine the

NDE scope of the internet to harvest collected data on the subject, clean and manipulate the data,

analyze the data, and present my findings. I am seeking to consolidate large sums of personal

accounts and perform text analysis to determine trends and insight. Based on the findings in this

project, it is clear that near-death experiences contain common trends and experiences. This

knowledge coupled with the data science method can be expanded to the NDE field of research.

keywords: near-death experiences, analytics, data mining, data manipulation, data science, text

mining, natural language processing, web scraping

THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 4

Chapter 1: Introduction

Background

A near-death experience is defined as “a lucid experience associated with perceived

consciousness apart from the body occurring at the time of actual or threatened imminent death”

(NDERF, n.d.). Essentially, a near-death experience is a consciousness’s departure from the

physical body at a time during or close to clinical death. Very frequently, the physical body will

have medically died, and the near-death experiencer will be subject to induced resuscitation or

naturally (and sometime miraculously) recover. Records of near-death experiences span

throughout history and have crossed societal and cultural barriers (IANDS, 2017). In this project,

I will use transcriptions of past near-death experiences and employ statistical and analytical tools

to perform analysis on this data. I hope to shed light to the field of near-death studies by

demonstrating commonalities in near-death experiences, harboring proof that near-death

experiences are not simply a medical anomaly and experiencers are depicting verifiable

occurrences.

Problem Statement

Despite decades of research and the application of research methods to the field of near-

death studies, there exists no real application of analytics to this realm of study, which

potentially has relegated it as a quasi-science.

Purpose of the Study

This project is grounded in developing an analytical manifestation to the field of near-

death studies, which ostensibly is non-existent or lacking. I intention to use concepts of data
THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 5

science, big data analytics, text mining, and natural language processing to discern trends within

raw data. I would like to prove the capacity of applying tools like Python and libraries like nltk

to analyze large sums of data, and how it can benefit the NDE field and the holistic general

population. The intention to perform a study like this on a seemingly ambiguous elusive field has

motivations which point to my own intrinsic interest in the field. I seek to complete this project

for my own personal gain, as I have doubts about what I’ve learned and intend on using my

findings to illuminate these uncertainties. Even though I do not have any associated

organizations or universities working with me, I hope to be able to present my findings should an

opportunity present itself.

Chapter 2: Literature Review

The Precedent

The two primary organizations, and their corresponding resources, I used to execute this project

are the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) and The Near-Death

Experience Research Foundation (NDERF). Each of these organizations seek to strengthen the

near-death experience field of study with thorough research and empower experiencers of such

phenomena with knowledge and relatability. Each organization has an online portal that collects

voluntary data through the means of online surveys and questionnaires that ask highly probing

personal questions about a subject’s respective near-death account. The procedure of research

entails employing inquiries concerning (not limited to): a subject’s religious views before and

after a near-death experience, the contingency of meeting and interacting with non-human beings

or entities, the presence of emotional feelings and experiences throughout stages of the near-

death experience, inter-spatial existence in accordance to the subject’s body and environment
THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 6

outside the body, encounters with a reality of existence outside the human body, and/or

heightened awareness due to existence outside of human body. A link to the IANDS near-death

experience survey can be found here, https://iands.org/ndes/nde-stories/archives.html, (IANDS,

2017), and the NDERF near-death experience questionnaire can be found here,

https://nderf.org/forms/ShareNDE/ShareNDE.php, (NDERF, n.d.). NDERF is a smaller

organization founded and run by Dr. Jeffrey and Dr. Jody Long, a radiation oncologist and

attorney duo, whose organization focuses on research. Contrastingly, IANDS is a worldwide

organization that holds summits each year in order to bridge the gap between NDE awareness

and research. Each organization has surveyed and archived a vast collection of near-death

accounts, which are documented as the questions and answers to each of the online

questionnaires. Neither of these organizations have an established database of information that

can be accessed for analytical procurement or seemingly even employ an analytics division to

their organization. IANDS has documented and recorded statistics concerning near-death

experiences and I endeavor to use these finding to gain a better perspective over the course of the

study. IANDS, based on their statistical research, lists the 15 most common characteristics of a

near-death experience contains one or two of the following elements and in some cases all of

them:

“a sense of being outside one’s physical body, sometimes perceiving it from an outside

position; a sense of movement through darkness or a tunnel; intense emotions;

heightened perceptions; experiencing a great light or darkness; perceiving a spiritual

realm, which may include vividly memorable landscapes; encounters with deceased

loved ones, spiritual beings and/or religious figures; knowledge of the nature of the

universe; a life review; a sense of oneness and interconnectedness; a border of no return;

THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 7

a sense of having knowledge of the future; messages regarding life’s purpose” (IANDS,

2017).

Aforementioned, NDERF is an organization managed and operated by an oncologist-attorney

duo. Consequently, the NDERF website attempts to bridge the gap between near-death

experiences being seen as a paranormal quasi-science and the application of scientific research

and medical resolve to answer common near-death experience questions. A typical answer to

near-death experiences involves relegating the notion of an NDE to a phenomenon of the brain

lacking oxygen (hypoxia) or dying brain cells (cerebral anoxia) (NDERF, n.d.). This project

seeks to provide a more informed answer as to the reasoning behind why a near-death experience

occurs and why a subject is able to “escape” death. Analytical methodology (as to what

corresponds in the latter mentioned section, Methodology Overview) will be employed to better

understand the pretense behind a near-death experience and common associations in having a

near-death experience by analyzing text from what is considered big data. Additionally,

analytical methodology will be employed to discover trends through big data analytics that may

or may not have been seen before. Statistical research methods tend to employ corresponding

sample-population based modeling, while big data modeling analyzes raw data that takes on the

characteristics of volume, velocity, and variety. Hence, this project endeavors to advance

existing research to provide better insight and understanding of near-death experiences.

The Data Fluency Problem

The question must be asked, why is the field of near-death studies lacking analytical

thought and application? Data fluency is defined as “the exchange of ideas with data as a

medium” (Gemignani, Galentino, Schuermann, & Gemignani, 2015, Location No. 905). The
THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 8

apparent lack of data fluency in society, particularly in the study of near-death experiences,

foments a clear lack of ability to consume such data effectively and efficiently. It may be

attributed as the reason behind the lack of analytics in near-death studies, a field that should be

driven on seeking trends and grounded upon analytical thought. Fluency of data demands

producers of data: understand the proper expression of data, are proficient and strategic in the

production of data, be involved in a data-centric organizational culture, discern what data tools to

use and when, and apply systems to properly acquire and manipulate data. (Location No. 861).

Gemignani et al. explores the need for data fluency within a field of study or organizational

culture and deeply explains the meaning and context of data fluency. Gemignani et al. contends

data fluency is imperative at both the personal and organizational level to be effective in gaining

insight, developing and actualizing trends, and consolidating data for consumption (Location No.

489).

In general, data mining is relatively simple but manipulating and formatting data in a way

that is meaningful is a problem that should be solved by humans. In relation to near-death

studies, there currently exists no consolidated housing of data, predominantly due to several

dissociated organizations studying the same concept. Unfortunately, the data of near-death

experiences are relegated to data silos, as a result of the Balkanization of the field, illustrated by

Gemignani. (Location No. 1131). The field is abundant with people who can interpret and

understand the context of raw data, but lacks problem solvers and researchers who are able to

meaningfully consume and consolidate the data in a way that provides use to the field. “Data is

useful when people use it to tell stories, craft compelling visualizations, and construct thoughtful

analyses. People are the missing ingredient” (Gemignani et al., 2015, Location No. 331).

Leaving the role of data fluency to a specific group of people promotes data elitism by relegating
THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 9

data into a silo. Instead, Gemignani et al. states the data elite should empower groups and fields

of study by building bridges and groundwork and promoting a shared data culture that essentially

allow others to create meaningful data themselves (Location No. 1185). This concept is what is

intrinsically missing from the near-death experience arena. Instead of a shared culture of

collaboration in research, dualities exist, and data is siloed.

Carande, Lipinski & Gusher (2017) of the Harvard Business Review assert that effective

data and analytics (D&A) start at the top (p. 3). They contend leadership should be profoundly

involved in delineating intentions across the culture of an organization, and in this case, a field of

study. They also assert that relegating contingent decisions to a small few can create intellectual

silos that produce competitive technologies, multiple goals, altering truths and analytical

recession within one a group. (Carande, Lipinski & Gusher, 2017, p. 3). The study goes on to

mention how certain organizations have potential to drive data and analytics, but limit data

interpretation and manipulation to a certain department. They assert that some organizations are

too reliant on software tools or smalls groups of people of higher expertise. This type of

modeling prevents organizations from producing transformative data and analytics. The studies

continue to intimate that IT professionals remain lacking specialized skills in data science, due to

executives disregarding and miscalculating the implication of need for quality data and analytics

producers. When this occurs enthusiasm for data and analytics can flounder, and essentially the

acumen and agility needed to propel the organization forward can also flounder, preventing goals

from being reached and deliverables from being established. (Carande, Lipinski & Gusher, 2017,

p. 2). Specifically, near-death experience researchers tend to be sole researchers and are often

accompanied by a handful of other researchers. As the concept of a near-death experience is

elusive, the field tends to be consigned as a pseudo-science. Furthermore, a near-death

THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 10

experience research organization often exists as a smaller organization that lacks data fluent

expertise or resources. Additionally, a combined collaboration toward actualizing a single goal

may prove useful in the industry toward big data analytics.

Chapter 3: Methodology

Overview

I followed a loosely scientific approach for this project, using step-by-step trial and error

methodology and a plethora of noted resources. Although, I didn’t formulate an explicit

hypothesis, I used the initial problem statement posed in my introduction as a guide. I resolved to

experiment with what would work, what wouldn’t work, and why. I continued finding solutions

and improving my model as the project progressed. Initially, I sought to find a viable solution by

adhering to online tutorials and guides. Ultimately, I applied strategies in text mining and natural

language processing, and a number of different tools for acquiring a viable solution to the

proposed course of planning for this project. The mid-semester mark was a low point for this

project, and I asked my mentor for other potential directions for this project to head to, but after

modifying the project I continued to follow my initial plan for this project. Aforementioned, this

project is of personal interest and will continue beyond the scope of the Capstone in Informatics

course but serves as a cornerstone to further development. My goal for this project is to perform

big data analysis on a large database of unstructured text. According to the staggering figures,

aforementioned, a large percent of the population has undergone a near-death experience, and

transcribed full-text versions of these experiences are recounted and posted online. I would like

to use text mining and natural language processing to analyze this raw text data and discover

potential trends that are seemingly common throughout these experiences. I will establish
THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 11

commonalities by looking for frequently occurring words in these experiences. As the project is

iterated into different phases, the following sub-sections describe the methods used - from

acquiring the data to applying text mining strategies to actualize solutions to my problem.

Phase 1. Web Scraping & Data Collection

Initially, the notion of employing a sentiment analysis was to be implemented as an

improvement benchmark and would be used as a means to discover trends in text. I realized later

that a sentiment analysis is used for measuring the general feeling (sentiment) of something,

commonly depicting a person’s opinion about a topic. In the context of this study, I felt that a

sentiment analysis may not be the appropriate method for achieving my goal. The data source

that I was using exists as narratives and personal accounts of near-death experiences, and one of

the goals of my project was to employ text analytics for analysis of these narratives, actualizing

trends in the text. I was not sure how to go about doing this, as I had never done any text

analytics in my degree, and so the search for the right tool and method of achieving this was a

tedious process. I specifically looked for open-source tools and researched a number of different

options and watched videos on how to operate these tools for text analytics. I eventually decided

to stick with what I knew – Python. My goal was to analyze the text from my data sources by

individual words (opposed to certain phrases). First, I had to determine how I could extract plain

text versions of the text I was trying to analyze. I searched endlessly, and the best tool I could

find was something called Textise (https://www.textise.net), which allows for a user to paste a

link to the targeted website of choice and return a plain text version. However, a challenge that I

faced was trying to find a solution to automate mining a website AND its directories within that

specific link. For example: the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) website
THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 12

contains a list of exceptional NDEs that were particularly interesting to me

(http://www.nderf.org/Archives/exceptional.html). This abbreviated “exceptional NDEs” page

contains links to other pages with full accounts of NDEs. I wanted to find a way download the

summation of this information into a plain text format. I conducted further research and found

the tool, Octoparse, “…a modern visual web data extraction software. Both experienced and

inexperienced users would find it easy to use Octoparse to bulk extract information from

websites, for most of scraping tasks no coding needed… Octoparse simulates human operation to

interact with web pages” (Octoparse, n.d.) This tool allowed me to enter the URL of a website

and allow primary and subsequent plain-text downloads of the main website and its respective

directories, output in HTML format. I was able to download 189 HTML pages of plain text from

the Exceptional NDEs page of the NDERF website. I then imported the contents of these pages

into Microsoft Word, where I was able to compile and conglomerate this information and output

it into a text file. In a Word document with 1-inch margins, the complete contents include 1,179

pages of information containing 967,134 raw words of text. I output a text file,

WordFull.text, imported it into Jupyter Notebook, and converted it into a Pandas

dataframe (Line 53 & 54).

Phase 2. Preparing the Model, Text Mining, & Integrating Natural Language Processing

Next, I installed the stopwords using the nltk.download() function (Line 55).

The NLTK downloader menu appears, and under the Corpora menu, choose stopwords by

Stopwords Corpus (see full instructions in Figure 3). Then I instantiated

stopwords.words and applied the English parameter (Line 56). The stopwords

function works by removing commonly used parts of speech, like articles (“the”, “a”) or
THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 13

conjunctions (“and”, “because”), etc. from a variety of different languages (Natural Language

Toolkit, n.d.). The replacement of words created null strings in the dataframe, so the

df.replace function was used to replace null strings with np.nan (Line 57). Then

df.dropna was used to remove all NaN values from the dataframe (Line 59). Additionally,

df.drop was further employed to remove a redundant column (Line 60). From there,

counter from collections was used to return the 50 most_common words in the text

(used to pre-analyze / forecast commonalities), arranged by frequency (Line 62). To improve on

the model, punctuation marks including the following characters, '!"#$%&\'()*+,-

./:;<=>?@[\\]^_`{}~', were removed from the dataframe (Line 63). In Line 65, I

employed the lower() method to normalize capitalization anomalies amongst the text

(example: “Time” to “time”). By completion of these steps, the raw data that was collected was

cleaned of common stop words, punctuation marks, and capitalization anomalies, and should

contain a remaining normalized list of words.

Phase 3. Experimentation: Introduction of New Data

The last phase of my experiment included the introduction of new data to the model and

comparison. From the cleaned text in the previous phase, I changed the dataframe into a list,

iwordzmostcommon, ordering the words by frequency (Line 66). Despite the name of this

list, it contained all words in the dataframe, and not just the most common. I originally used the

200 most common words, but changed it back to the full list to include the full scope of words. I,

however, kept the variable name the same in hopes of preserving the model and preventing it

from “crashing” due to repetitive variable name changes. I treated this list as a sort of “ground

truth” and used it as the measure to compare all new text introductions to the model. This list of
THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 14

words (over 900,000 words) originated from the Exceptional NDEs page, and contained data

from near-death experiences as early as the 1950s and as late as 2018. The last phase of my

experiment involved introducing seven new sets of text, obtained from the NDERF website and

comparing it to the iwordzmostcommon list. These sets of texts were randomly selected and

originate from a range of different dates. I wanted to be intentional about selecting texts from a

range of different years, to see if there were any differences in common words depending on the

year the near-death experience occurred. Iteration 1 was an NDE that occurred in [undisclosed

month] 2012, Iteration 2’s experience occurred in August 1971, Iteration 3 occurred in

November 2001, Iteration 4 was an NDE that occurred in June 1978, Iteration 5 occurred in

April 2005, Iteration 6’s NDE occurred in [summer] of 1957, and finally Iteration 7 was an NDE

that occurred in an undisclosed month of 1988. For each iteration, I began with loading a new

text file (first iteration in Line 67) called newintroduction.txt (append number to end of file name

for each iteration). I then converted the text into a Pandas dataframe, removed all stopwords,

replaced nulls, cleaned up punctuation, and removed capitalization anomalies. I took the 200

most common words from each iteration (inewwordzmostcommon – append number for each

iteration) and compared it to the original list iwordzmostcommon. I took the 0th column from

each list and converted each into a respective dataframe, df1 and df2. I compared each list by

merging (essentially an inner join) the two collections together and looking for anomalies. From

the sources I looked at, the most effective way of compiling two lists and determining

commonalities was to use the merge function (stackoverflow Finding, n.d.) (stackoverflow

Pandas, n.d.). I repeated this process seven times, and for the final step, combined each of the

most common lists and ordered by the 200 most common words.
THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 15

Evaluation: Inspecting the Precedent & Limitations of this Project

To reiterate the past sections, I spent time parsing and cleansing the original source of

data (the WordFull.txt file) to ensure that any anomalous data (stopwords, punctuation,

capitalization) was removed. This process was to ensure that I have a full raw set of words for

comparison to the new data that was introduced. It was compiled and arranged by the most

commonly used words in 189 transcribed NDE accounts. The purpose of compiling this list was

to collect a large sum of data first and organize it for comparison to new introductions of text.

New text was then introduced and compared to the established list, looking for commonalities

based on frequency of word usage. I would like to note: before this project began, I reached out

to one of the leaders of IANDS, a professor at the University of North Texas, with no response. I

intentioned to share my findings and collaborate with the field of near-death studies in hopes of

applying analytical thought to this field. However, I lacked success in getting in touch with a

representative of this field, and consequently the true application of the data science method can

only occur through theoretical thought at this moment (outlined below). Potentially in the future,

as this project continues, I may be able to collaborate with either of the two organizations listed,

NDERF or IANDS.

Evaluation: Implementing the Data Science Method as a Solution (Theoretical)

The Data Science method consists of the application of big data analytics coupled with

the adoption of a data fluent culture. This application of big data analytics and analytical tools, as

stated before, will be accomplished through collaboration with a respective organization or

university. Per this project, the Data Science method is the key to the advancement of the field of

near-death studies as, in my opinion, big data analysis and trend actualization on a large scale is
THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 16

the missing element to true analysis of near-death experiences (compared to analysis on separate

cases or without analytical tools like Python and its respective libraries involved). This project

can be seen as a stepping stone to the potential future applications of data science within the field

of near-death studies, as it bridges the gap between manual human analysis (potentially time-

consuming and lacks efficiency if performed in tool like Excel) and machine learning. Using a

Python library like nltk can prove extremely useful in parsing text information and providing

analytical thought processes to the field. Moreover, employing a data scientist or even a team of

analysts can further the research sector of this field as it provides a means of actualizing trends.

Compared to one person manually parsing, cleaning, and reducing raw transcription data,

application of data science and analytics has the potential to further this field immensely. In my

opinion, analytics is the key to reversing the commonly designated misconception that the field

of near-death studies is a quasi-science.

Chapter 4: Experimental Findings, Evaluating Error, & Future Improvements

The intention to text mine and apply concepts of natural language processing to the

original and subsequent text data was to discern trends within the data. The seven iterations of

the model output seven dataframes containing the most frequently used words in each set of new

texts (see Figure 1). Unsurprisingly, the word “experience” was commonly found in the list of

most frequent words. This is clearly due to the topic being near-death experiences and the word

experience being a common theme amongst these text transcriptions. Other frequently used

words include irrelevant parts of speech like the word “yes”, “it”, and “I”. The nltk stopwords

function was employed to remove words like these, but these words may or may not have been

included in the list. Additionally, towards the end of this project I inferred that a potential reason
THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 17

why these certain words were not removed was due to the stopwords function being applied to

the dataset before cleaning it. This is important, as anomalous data like capitalized words

(example, “I”) or words with punctuation attached (example: “it.”) may not be recognized by the

stopwords function’s list of words to remove. In a future iteration, I would normalize the data

before applying natural language tools like stopwords. I also noticed that one of the most

commonly used words returns a null string, and this is due to how the system parses a sentence.

Since sentences require spaces, the null values can’t be removed without intricate code additions,

and so it must be ignored for this project (may be applied to future projects).

The final phase of this project compiled the list of frequently used words in each of the

independent sets of text and parsed the dataset to find the most frequently used words within this

compiled list. Essentially, this step was implemented as a means of taking an average of the data.

I took the top 30 most significantly recurring words in this compilation, ignoring words that are

common parts of speech like “the”, “what”, “I”, etc. The list of top 30 recurring words

(predominantly nouns and verbs) includes: time, life, body, feel (and derivatives), remember,

things, way, light, see (and derivatives), everything, know (and derivatives), people, thought,

beings, ever, unearthly, religion, part, tunnel, future, past, scenes, experience, love, god, and

information. Out of this top 30 list, 20% of these words occurs in all 7 sets of text (time, life,

body, feel (and derivatives), remember, and things) and 93% of words occur in at least 6 out of 7

of these sets of texts (see Figure 2). This data (from text that was collected completely randomly)

is indicative of showing trends. I predict a future implementation of this project that can analyze

a large number of new introductions will show nearly the same information.

Some things that may be improved upon in future iterations of this project are following.

I noticed toward the end of this project, while parsing through some of the raw data, that
THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 18

reasoning for some commonalities between text sets may be attributed to the website’s listing of

common questions for each NDE page, such as “Did you pass into or through a tunnel?” or “Did

you see any beings in your experience?”. However, this implication only affects the data

minimally as most of the words used repeatedly in the question section of each NDE page, is

only repeated a few times. For example, in the first iteration, significant words like life and light

were used 26 and 24 times, respectively, throughout the full text. In comparison to the frequency

of most of these words, words in the question sections only account for a fraction of the times

they were used throughout the complete text. An exception would be the word “experience”,

which was used repeatedly and potentially is accounted for just by being used in the question

sections. In future iterations, I could implement additional code to remove unwanted words,

especially those that contribute to anomalous data and words that the stopwords function failed

to remove (examples: “experience(s)”, “yes”, “no”, etc.).

Chapter 5: Conclusion, Limitations, Interpretation, & Recommendation

Conclusion & Limitations

The intention of this study was to comprehensively assess how data science and analytics

could potentially benefit the field of near-death studies. Extensive research in the literature

review section resolves these claims made in this project report. Methods and experimental

findings demonstrate how potential analytical manifestations may improve this field, taking into

context the limitations of this project. Consider that this project was designed, coordinated, and

implemented over the course of a few months (a university semester) by only one person

dedicating a few hours a week towards the goals of this project. Conceptualize the profound

effect that adopting the practices and tools outlined in this project may have on this field of
THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 19

research. I found through the introduction of raw text data, several commonalities were found

within the transcripts of each of these near-death experiences. To sum up my findings, I included

a wordcloud that was used depict the compilation of words found in my WordFull.txt document,

towards the beginning of this project. This wordcloud displays the most emphasized words in the

document and reflect my findings towards the latter phases of this project (see Figure 4).

Interpretation

The question must be asked: how could seven randomly selected instances of near-death

experiences, ranging back 61 years, show commonality with words in these transcripts indicating

emphasis on words like: time, life, light, beings, religion, tunnel, love, god, and information? In

the context of near-death studies, the tunnel and the light are extremely common sights that are

experienced. Experiencers depict their consciousness moving from a physical body into a

perceived tunnel, and then approaching and becoming one with the energy of a light that

overwhelms them with feelings of love, happiness, acceptance, and elation, no matter what

religion or background they are from. Aforementioned, many relegate the idea of the light and

the tunnel as attributed to hypoxia but fail to realize that the overwhelming majority of

experiencers see sights and sounds that eclipse this claim. How can large populations of near-

death experiencers have clear recollection of events like having a life-review or interacting with

deceased relatives? (NDERF, n.d.) In my opinion, further applications of data science and

analytics can elucidate these remaining questions.

THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 20

Recommendations

The methods and findings detailed in this report indicate positive potential to near-death

studies. Future implementations of this project may begin with analyzing more near-death

experiences, taking into account the improvements listed in Chapter 4. I believe that branching

out from single words and including phrases like “life review” (common feature of NDEs), may

prove useful analytically. Future iterations and improvements on this project may include

additional manifestations including, but not limited to: a consolidated database of information

spanning several organizations, text mining from non-text sources like YouTube videos, and/or

visualization of findings for disseminating to the public.

References

Carande, C., Lipinski, P., & Gusher, T. (2017, June 23). How to Integrate Data and Analytics

into Every Part of Your Organization. Retrieved September 20, 2018, from

https://hbr.org/2017/06/how-to-integrate-data-and-analytics-into-every-part-of-your-

organization.

Gemignani, Z., Galentino, R., Schuermann, P., & Gemignani, C. (2015). Data Fluency:

Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication [Kindle DX

Version]. Wiley. Retrieved from Amazon.com.

Han, Jiawei, et al. Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2012.

International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS). (2017, August 29). Key Facts about

Near-Death Experiences. Retrieved September 13, 2018, from https://iands.org/near-

death experiences/about-near-death experiences/key-near-death experience-

facts21.html?start=1.
THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 21

Müller Andreas C., and Sarah Guido. Introduction to Machine Learning with Python: a Guide for

Data Scientists. OReilly, 2017.

Natural Language Toolkit. “Accessing Text Corpora and Lexical Resources.” NLTK Book,

Natural Language Toolkit, www.nltk.org/book/ch02.html.

Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF), & Long, J. (n.d.). Frequently Asked

Questions. Retrieved September 26, 2018, from http://www.nderf.org/faqs.htm

Near-Death Experience Research Foundation. (n.d.) “How Many NDEs Occur in the United

States Every Day?” Current NDEs, Near-Death Experience Research Foundation,

www.nderf.org/NDERF/Research/number_nde_usa.htm.

Octoparse. “Octoparse Tutorial.” Web Scraping Tool & Free Web Crawlers for Data Extraction |

Octoparse, Octoparse, www.octoparse.com/doc-wf/introduction.

stackoverflow. “Finding Common Rows (Intersection) in Two Pandas Dataframes.” Stack

Overflow, Stackoverflow, stackoverflow.com/questions/19618912/finding-common-

rows-intersection-in-two-pandas-dataframes.

stackoverflow. “Pandas - Intersection of Two Data Frames Based on Column Entries.” Stack

Overflow, Stackoverflow, stackoverflow.com/questions/26921943/pandas-intersection-

of-two-data-frames-based-on-column-entries.

van Lommel, Pim. “About the Continuity of Our Conciousness.” Near-Death Experience

Research Foundation, www.nderf.org/NDERF/Research/vonlommel_consciousness.htm.

THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 22

Appendix
THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 23

Figure 1. (above) Compiled list of most frequently used words in each of the seven iterations of
raw text transcripts, arranged by frequency. The higher the item is on the list, the more
frequently it appears in the respective text.

Figure 2. The most frequently occurring words in the final compiled list of all seven iterations of
raw text, and each word’s respective frequency. Essentially shows an average of the data, and
indicates that 93% of significant words occur in at least six of the seven sets of text.
THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 24

Figure 3. An illustration of the nltk downloader tool that appears when employing the command,
nltk.download(). To install stopwords, select the Corpora tab at the top, scroll down to
stopwords, click on it, and click download. Once it is finished, close this downloader tool and
resume in your code.
THE ANALYTICS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES 25

Figure 4. A stunning visualization of frequently used words in transcripts of recounted near-

death experiences. From this visualization we can infer that a purported “afterlife” can be
characterized by love, life, and light (amongst others).