Distant Reader - author-baconFrancis-freebo

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 2021-05-23 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 42 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,565,674 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 37,277 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.

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 91. 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.

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:

king, will, may, one, great, yet, time, good, man, much, also, first, men, made, shall, things, like, well, make, therefore, lord, many, now, nature, haue, god, two, part, hee, without, sir, though, vpon, doth, bee, majesty, self, body, must, doe, law, life, see, matter, take, long, might, england, true, kings

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The history of the reigns of Henry the Seventh, Henry the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, and Queen Mary the first written by the Right Honourable Francis Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Alban ; the other three by the Right Honourable and Right Reverend Father in God, Francis Godwyn, Lord Bishop of Hereford., Resuscitatio, or, Bringing into publick light severall pieces of the works, civil, historical, philosophical, & theological, hitherto sleeping, of the Right Honourable Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount Saint Alban according to the best corrected coppies : together with His Lordships life / by William Rawley ..., and The historie of the reigne of King Henry the Seuenth VVritten by the Right Hon: Francis Lo: Virulam, Viscount S. Alban. Whereunto is now added a very vsefull and necessary table..

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

francis bacon, king henry, french king, english books, early english, sir francis, experiment solitary, many times, sir thomas, books online, wee see, may bee, long life, sir tho, haue beene, queen elizabeth, will make, page images, creation partnership, may please, queens majesty, text creation, must needs, sir henry, set forth, lord chancellor, right honorable, great seal, living creatures, solitary touching, king edward, common law, liuing creatures, sir william, mean time, many things, put forth, wee haue, every one, queens majesties, sir walter, long time, lord chief, shall find, shall bee, set downe, will never, henry norris, next day, taken away

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Three speeches of the Right Honorable, Sir Francis Bacon Knight, then his Majesties Sollicitor Generall, after Lord Verulam, Viscount Saint Alban. Concerning the post-nati naturalization of the Scotch in England union of the lawes of the kingdomes of England and Scotland. Published by the authors copy, and licensed by authority. The temple of vvisdom for the little world in two parts. The first philosophically divine, treating of the being of all beeings, and whence everything hath its origins as heaven, hell, angels, men and devils, earth, stars and elements. And particularly of all mysteries concerning the soul, and of Adam before and after the fall. Also, a treatise of the four complexions, and the causes of spiritual sadness, &c. To which is added, a postscript to all students in arts and sciences. Second part, morally divine, containing abuses stript and whipt, by Geo. Wither, with his description of fair virtue. Secondly. A collection of divine poems from ... Essayes and religious meditations of Sir Francis Bacon, Knight. Collected, published and intended for a general good. By D.L., and Ordinances made by the Right Honourable Sir Francis Bacon ... being then Lord Chancellor for the better and more regular administration of iustice in the Chancery, to be daily observed saving the prerogative of this court..

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 carrel include:

tcp, king, man, lord, nature, god, church, state, court, law, thing, sir, people, majesty, england, prince, men, matter, majesties, earth, body, world, queen, parliament, lordship, life, kingdome, kingdom, history, english, bee, sun, religion, maiestie, government, good, death, war, tower, time, subjects, son, sea, queene, princes, power, peace, nation, mr., motion

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 king, and True peace, or, A moderate discourse to compose the unsettled consciences and greatest differences in ecclesiastical affaires written long since by the no less famous then learned Sir Francis Bacon ... 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 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:

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

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, things, man, men, part, self, body, nature, thing, life, hee, hath, people, way, matter, others, doth, place, times, reason, kings, day, nothing, parts, death, end, manner, person, lordship, cause, power, one, use, kind, king, rest, opinion, words, mind, case, side, persons, winds, hand, course, years, knowledge, work, name, world

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:

is, be, was, are, were, have, had, being, made, did, do, make, said, been, see, take, come, put, say, set, taken, came, know, let, thought, bee, done, touching, think, give, according, having, hath, haue, found, am, sent, concerning, called, brought, find, used, speak, call, given, doe, heard, answered, hold, 〈

Proper Nouns

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

king, 〉, ◊, lord, god, 〈, sir, majesty, hath, england, law, ●, doe, nature, queen, man, haue, court, men, prince, henry, france, church, spirit, majesties, duke, water, hee, wee, state, parliament, spirits, bee, earth, c., scotland, english, aire, tcp, beene, mr., earl, francis, world, london, sea, princes, house, kingdom, matter

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, his, i, he, they, their, them, him, you, your, my, we, her, our, me, she, himself, us, themselves, its, thy, yours, thee, mine, one, vp, theirs, ours, whereof, hers, hee, myself, ye, ''s, vnto, s, ●, tollit, ng, ian, herself, em, ay, 〈, yourself, whosoever, vvith, us''d, thou, severall

Below are words cloud of your 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 my study carrel positive or negative?"

other, great, good, such, many, more, same, first, much, own, true, little, like, better, most, new, last, former, greater, best, long, second, small, full, certain, old, common, whole, few, particular, least, present, excellent, young, high, wise, fit, french, third, late, able, greatest, strong, ancient, open, next, hot, strange, private, haue

not, so, then, also, more, therefore, now, well, yet, as, most, much, very, rather, only, first, out, onely, too, likewise, forth, up, never, there, ever, in, long, again, here, thus, thereof, sometimes, especially, before, together, indeed, away, off, otherwise, far, somewhat, no, even, down, still, almost, over, commonly, further, often

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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