Distant Reader - author-daviesJohn-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 30 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 4,264,433 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 147,049 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:

one, much, will, great, love, made, yet, may, time, make, shall, well, self, two, see, since, without, good, might, us, know, though, man, never, also, first, must, many, little, thing, things, day, place, came, men, come, now, say, give, ever, think, take, reason, thought, king, long, part, person, another, put

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Clelia, an excellent new romance the whole work in five parts, dedicated to Mademoiselle de Longueville / written in French by the exquisite pen of Monsieur de Scudery, governour of Nostredame de la Garde., The voyages and travells of the ambassadors sent by Frederick, Duke of Holstein, to the Great Duke of Muscovy and the King of Persia begun in the year M.DC.XXXIII. and finish''d in M.DC.XXXIX : containing a compleat history of Muscovy, Tartary, Persia, and other adjacent countries : with several publick transactions reaching near the present times : in VII. books. Whereto are added the Travels of John Albert de Mandelslo (a gentleman belonging to the embassy) from Persia into the East-Indies ... in III. books ... / written originally by Adam Olearius, secretary to the embassy ; faithfully rendered into English, by John Davies., and Astrea. Part 2. a romance / written in French by Messire Honoré D''Urfe ; and translated by a person of quality..

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

mean time, every one, must needs, one day, let us, next day, make use, many times, long time, one another, great number, will never, great duke, every day, next morning, good will, shall never, ever since, will make, every thing, one side, good fortune, right hand, don pedro, young man, take away, three hundred, well enough, two hundred, much troubled, like manner, long since, went away, must confesse, many things, made use, taken away, will give, short time, must confess, must know, first place, carried away, shall see, may well, five hundred, thousand men, old man, greatest part, whose name

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Letters of affaires love and courtship. Written to several persons of honour and quality; / by the exquisite pen of Monsieur de Voiture, a member of the famous French Academy established at Paris by Cardinall de Richelieu. English''d by J.D. Reflections upon Monsieur Des Cartes''s Discourse of a method for the well-guiding of reason, and discovery of truth in the sciences. Written by a private pen in French, and translated out of the original manuscript, by J.D., and The history of magick by way of apology, for all the wise men who have unjustly been reputed magicians, from the Creation, to the present age. / Written in French, by G. Naudæus late library-keeper to Cardinal Mazarin. Englished by J. Davies..

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:

king, city, country, father, world, sea, tcp, master, man, love, lord, letter, gods, church, sun, son, river, religion, paris, madam, great, god, emperour, thing, law, lady, history, chamber, book, army, war, town, state, soul, nymph, mother, earth, court, author, women, temple, st., shepherd, reason, queen, province, prince, pope, phillis, person

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 unto, and Clelia, an excellent new romance the whole work in five parts, dedicated to Mademoiselle de Longueville / written in French by the exquisite pen of Monsieur de Scudery, governour of Nostredame de la Garde. 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, self, man, thing, things, day, place, love, men, reason, person, part, nothing, others, way, life, people, death, t, affection, heart, manner, one, world, rest, persons, name, side, words, hath, end, body, hand, night, order, house, eyes, discourse, power, cause, years, hands, occasion, mind, opinion, parts, times, year, word, company

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, was, be, had, have, are, were, said, do, being, did, made, make, been, having, see, know, am, came, come, say, give, think, take, went, put, done, thought, tell, love, go, found, took, speak, let, told, taken, called, answered, brought, sent, gave, find, has, seen, hath, saw, believe, knew, does

Proper Nouns

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

〉, ◊, prince, 〈, king, god, madam, city, hath, thou, c., father, love, rome, sea, diana, lord, aronces, clelia, astrea, army, world, princess, son, caesar, herminius, heaven, de, master, sir, ●, sun, river, phillis, tarquin, church, brutus, war, romans, country, christ, court, hylas, lady, lover, shepherd, celadon, amilcar, valeria, letter

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?"

he, i, it, you, his, they, him, her, she, their, them, me, my, your, we, our, himself, us, themselves, its, thy, thee, one, yours, mine, theirs, hers, ours, herself, whereof, ''s, us''d, myself, ian, yourself, dy''d, ye, whence, ourselves, l, thou, punish''d, judg''d, encompass''d, vy''d, s, ii, hitherto, ‖, u

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, such, same, much, good, many, little, more, own, first, certain, last, true, fair, several, able, least, long, greater, most, better, greatest, young, full, particular, whole, new, mean, excellent, best, happy, next, dead, common, strange, old, second, small, high, few, ordinary, ready, very, present, pleasant, former, possible, impossible, necessary

not, so, then, very, as, more, much, most, well, never, also, only, up, now, ever, yet, out, therefore, there, thus, away, too, soon, no, together, long, down, again, far, rather, indeed, before, in, still, onely, all, sometimes, first, off, here, even, afterwards, enough, presently, already, easily, over, thereof, almost, once

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.

Thank you for using the Distant Reader.