Distant Reader - annArbor-from-hathi

Introduction

This is a Distant Reader "study carrel", a set of structured data intended to help the student, researcher, or scholar use & understand a corpus.

This study carrel was created on 2021-01-24 by Eric Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>. The carrel was created using the Distant Reader trust process, and the input was a HaithTrust metadata (TSV) file locally cached with the name metadata.tsv. Given the metadata file, associated PDF documents where saved to a a cache and a second set of documents were saved to a set of plain text files. All of the analysis -- "reading" -- has been done against the plain text files. For example, a short narrative report has been created. This Web page is a more verbose version of that report.

All study carrels are self-contained -- no Internet connection is necessary to use them. Download this carrel for offline reading. The carrel is made up of many subdirectories and data files. The manifest describes each one in greater detail.

Size

The study carrel is 683,848 words long. Each item in the study carrel is, on average, 26,301 words long. If you dig deeper, then you might want to save yourself some time by reading a shorter item. On the other hand, if your desire is for more detail, then you might consider reading a longer item. The following illustrate the overall size of the study carrel.

Readability

On a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 is very difficult and 100 is very easy, the documents have an average readability score of 79. Consequently, if you want to read something more simplistic, then consider a document with a higher score. If you want something more specialized, then consider something with a lower score. The following illustrate the overall readability of the study carrel.

Word Frequencies

By merely counting & tabulating the frequency of individual words or phrases, you can begin to get an understanding of the carrel's "aboutness". Excluding "stop words", some of the more frequent words include:

shall, city, said, ann, may, council, arbor, one, res, common, sec, street, board, time, person, main, public, ordinance, section, first, south, two, made, provided, state, north, fire, office, house, within, buildings, building, clerk, thereof, streets, huron, ordinances, cor, day, will, john, persons, make, place, east, church, year, per, act, charter

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are: 1) Charter and ordinances 1907-1908, 2) Charter of the city of Ann Arbor Compilers: Isaac G. Reynolds [and] Willis Blakeslee , and 3) Charter and ordinances 1876.

The most frequent two-word phrases (bigrams) include:

ann arbor, common council, said city, council shall, south main, city clerk, said board, council may, public works, north main, east huron, person shall, ordinance shall, ordinance relative, assessment roll, shall take, main street, per cent, one hundred, city shall, city treasurer, city directory, arbor tales, fire department, arbor city, special assessment, board shall, huron street, shall also, mon council, ten days, take effect, clerk shall, shall make, county jail, first day, hundred dollars, may deem, said common, shall keep, first monday, state street, thirty days, per annum, said company, real estate, thousand dollars, fire commissioners, building code, one year

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are: 1) Charter and ordinances 1907-1908, 2) Ann Arbor yesterdays , and 3) Charter and ordinances 1876.

While often deemed superficial or sophomoric, rudimentary frequencies and their associated "word clouds" can be quite insightful:

Keywords

Sets of keywords -- statistically significant words -- can be enumerated by comparing the relative frequency of words with the number of times the words appear in an entire corpus. Some of the most statistically significant keywords in the study carrel include:

ann arbor, city, shall, city treasurer, city clerk, michigan, common council, city marshal, city limits, city corporation, section, ordinance relative, city taxes, city ordinance, city officers, ann street, ann arbor gas, ann arbor city, ann, south main street, city water pipes, city recorder, city purposes, charter, arbor, annual city charter election, ann arbor water, ann arbor railroad, william h. h., w. w., w. d. m., v ^ 旨, unpaid city taxes, state, south state, south second, south main st., south main, south fifth, south division, sec, school, s. west huron, s. s. ann, r., present st. andrew, present city, op ann arbor, old ann arbor, officio city clerk

And now word clouds really begin to shine:

Topic Modeling

Topic modeling is another popular approach to connoting the aboutness of a corpus. If the study carrel could be summed up in a single word, then that word might be shall, and 1970 census of housing. Block statistics : Ann Arbor, Mich. urbanized area is most about that word.

If the study carrel could be summed up in three words ("topics") then those words and their significantly associated titles include:

If your study carrel could be summed up in five topics, and each topic were each denoted with three words, then those topics and their most significantly associated files would be:

shall, city, said - Charter and ordinances 1907-1908
ann, arbor, church - Ann Arbor Baptist v.1-5 1888-1893
10, 00, 11 - 1980 census of population and housing. Census tracts. Ann Arbor, Mich., standard metropolitan statistical area
res, main, south - Chapin''s city directory of Ann Arbor 1868
зн, ihm, 0k - Some views; being a pictorial study of the campus of the university of Michigan, the city of Ann Arbor & its environs

Moreover, the totality of the study carrel's aboutness, can be visualized with the following pie chart:

Noun & Verbs

Through an analysis of the study carrel's parts-of-speech, you are able to answer question beyonds aboutness. For example, a list of the most frequent nouns helps you answer what questions; "What is discussed in this collection?":

city, council, res, street, time, person, ordinance, section, _, board, office, buildings, streets, clerk, ordinances, fire, persons, day, building, 一, ！, year, duties, place, feet, house, days, election, taxes, charter, years, officers, property, purpose, notice, work, tax, treasurer, act, i, members, water, part, dollars, power, duty, assessment, owner, mayor, number

An enumeration of the verbs helps you learn what actions take place in a text or what the things in the text do. Very frequently, the most common lemmatized verbs are "be", "have", and "do"; the more interesting verbs usually occur further down the list of frequencies:

be, said, is, was, have, are, had, were, been, provided, made, make, has, do, used, see, take, paid, required, given, being, passed, provide, exceeding, pay, ing, appointed, keep, having, give, amended, did, cause, held, kept, approved, set, came, done, elected, making, found, deemed, 's, constructed, come, prevent, known, deem, following

Proper Nouns

An extraction of proper nouns helps you determine the names of people and places in the study carrel.

Ann, Arbor, Sec, s., Main, ANN, South, Huron, City, ARBOR, cor, North, W., John, State, J., bds, ., CITY, M., H., S., Mrs., C., A., William, East, Detroit, Michigan, e., w., B., University, n., E., D., Fifth, Fourth, ？, F., Mich., Washington, res, Washtenaw, West, SEC, St., L., Board, council

An analysis of personal pronouns enables you to answer at least two questions: 1) "What, if any, is the overall gender of my study carrel?", and 2) "To what degree are the texts in my study carrel self-centered versus inclusive?"

it, he, his, i, their, they, you, her, its, him, she, them, we, our, my, me, us, your, himself, themselves, one, itself, herself, thy, 'em, thee, myself, yourself, mine, ourselves, be-, 's, yours, 一, ex-, hers, hereinbefore, ye, theirs, gen-, ours, oth-, as-, thyself, thereof, promptly, ani-, ザ001, ’s, 一40级なx

Below are words cloud of the study carrel's proper & personal pronouns.

Adjectives & Verbs

Learning about a corpus's adjectives and adverbs helps you answer how questions: "How are things described and how are things done?" An analysis of adjectives and adverbs also points to a corpus's overall sentiment. "In general, is this study carrel positive or negative?"

such, other, common, same, public, first, more, necessary, special, little, less, old, general, good, second, new, many, proper, own, several, least, large, present, great, main, full, high, young, open, pro-, long, subject, next, real, -, relative, last, annual, due, local, liable, small, private, much, square, few, personal, legal, able, whole

not, so, thereof, up, out, also, as, then, now, n't, only, down, hereby, very, at, just, well, more, therein, re-, here, most, on, back, there, herein, otherwise, first, together, away, too, in, even, however, again, never, still, ever, over, soon, always, thereto, once, far, off, thence, long, later, often, much

Next steps

There is much more to a study carrel than the things outlined above. Use this page's menubar to navigate and explore in more detail. There you will find additional features & functions including: ngrams, parts-of-speech, grammars, named entities, topic modeling, a simple search interface, etc.

Again, study carrels are self-contained. Download this carrel for offline viewing and use.

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