austen-persuasion-1818


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 2021-02-06 by Eric Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>. The carrel was created using the Distant Reader zip2carrel process, and the input was a Zip file locally cached with the name input-file.zip. Documents in the Zip file have been saved in a cache, and each of them have been transformed & saved as a set of plain text files. All of the analysis -- "reading" -- has been done against these 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

There are 23 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 81,524 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 3,544 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 charts illustrate the overall size of the carrel.

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histogram of sizes
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box plot of sizes

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 72. 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 charts illustrate the overall readability of the carrel.

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histogram of readability
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box plot of readability

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:

anne, captain, mrs, mr, elliot, must, one, much, lady, wentworth, good, little, will, well, might, now, charles, time, think, never, nothing, sir, great, know, miss, man, see, soon, mary, though, russell, quite, musgrove, first, two, without, always, walter, bath, louisa, every, long, say, made, seemed, house, thought, go, may, better

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are chapter-011, chapter-022, and chapter-021.

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

captain wentworth, mr elliot, lady russell, sir walter, mrs smith, mrs clay, mrs musgrove, captain benwick, miss elliot, great deal, mrs croft, captain harville, charles hayter, camden place, lady dalrymple, anne elliot, colonel wallis, mr shepherd, miss musgroves, kellynch hall, young man, mrs harville, miss anne, mr musgrove, louisa musgrove, great house, miss carteret, replied anne, charles musgrove, dare say, many years, admiral croft, good humour, next morning, mrs wallis, anne felt, came back, cried mrs, anne found, young people, little charles, good company, walter elliot, mrs charles, cried anne, eight years, dear miss, westgate buildings, last night, mr wentworth

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are chapter-020 chapter-011, and chapter-021.

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

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unigrams
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bigrams

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 carrel include:

anne, mrs, elliot, captain, wentworth, russell, walter, sir, louisa, mary, lady, harville, charles

And now word clouds really begin to shine:

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keywords

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 anne, and chapter-019 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:

  1. anne - chapter-020
  2. anne - chapter-022
  3. anne - chapter-009

If the 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:

  1. anne, lady, russell - chapter-016
  2. anne, elliot, mr - chapter-021
  3. captain, anne, wentworth - chapter-009
  4. captain, anne, louisa - chapter-018
  5. engagement, nineteen, confidence - chapter-003

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

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topic model

Noun & Verbs

Through an analysis of your 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?":

time, nothing, man, father, sister, friend, way, day, room, house, feelings, family, moment, something, woman, party, mind, morning, acquaintance, home, others, evening, years, anything, side, place, life, character, manner, everything, wife, heart, deal, spirits, thing, pleasure, name, mother, idea, sort, people, one, course, part, company, account, interest, world, husband, manners

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:

was, had, be, have, been, were, is, do, being, said, did, think, are, know, am, see, has, seemed, made, having, say, go, make, found, thought, give, felt, come, done, came, going, heard, knew, seen, saw, gone, take, believe, left, cried, looking, feel, wish, looked, known, passed, leave, does, look, hear

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nouns
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verbs

Proper Nouns

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

anne, captain, mrs, elliot, mr, wentworth, lady, charles, russell, mary, musgrove, sir, miss, walter, louisa, bath, harville, elizabeth, uppercross, henrietta, benwick, smith, clay, kellynch, lyme, admiral, croft, musgroves, hayter, place, wallis, shepherd, camden, dalrymple, crofts, frederick, colonel, hall, street, harvilles, house, great, cottage, cobb, london, carteret, winthrop, shirley, dr, god

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?"

her, i, she, it, he, you, his, him, they, their, them, my, me, herself, we, your, himself, its, our, us, themselves, myself, one, yourself, itself, yours, mine, theirs, ourselves, hers, ours

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

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proper nouns
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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 my study carrel positive or negative?"

good, little, own, other, more, such, great, much, same, many, young, first, last, sure, happy, few, better, poor, short, present, possible, old, next, dear, agreeable, least, best, glad, general, full, fine, able, only, long, former, bad, whole, strong, sensible, different, true, right, high, very, new, worse, likely, ready, natural, excellent

not, very, so, only, as, now, never, more, well, too, again, soon, much, always, quite, most, however, all, there, up, away, ever, even, then, still, long, off, here, just, indeed, back, almost, rather, perhaps, at, together, out, down, once, yet, enough, certainly, perfectly, really, over, on, hardly, before, in, afterwards

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adjectives
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adverbs

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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