Distant Reader - author-homer-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 2021-05-24 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 7 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 384,509 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 54,929 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 100. 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:

now, will, men, one, man, shall, made, yet, went, come, see, let, gods, good, great, came, may, go, ulysses, son, much, make, first, hand, many, achilles, though, house, well, still, like, take, jove, way, vlysses, trojans, set, since, home, know, father, hector, two, ship, greeks, sea, away, fight, troy, king

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Homer''s Odysses. Translated according to ye Greeke by. Geo: Chapman, Homer''s Iliads in English by Tho. Hobbes ; to which may be added Homers Odysses, Englished by the same author., and Homer''s Odysses translated by Tho. Hobbes of Malmsbury ; with a large preface concerning the vertues of an heroique poem written by the translator..

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

one another, let us, old man, homers odysses, early english, english books, many men, shall see, long time, diuine vlysses, books online, go home, good ship, hither come, come away, let vs, good chear, achilles tent, come home, euery one, patroclus body, may see, mine owne, good ships, good store, one man, euery man, page images, meane space, king alcinous, le tell, king agamemnon, went away, two men, let fall, made good, come back, argive ships, two sons, long since, one anothers, old laertes, might see, body dead, text creation, fathers house, immortal gods, great ajax, creation partnership, coming home

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The first booke of Homer''s Iliads Translated by Thomas Grantham, professor of the speedy way of teaching the Hebrew, Greek, and Latine tongues in London, at the Golden-Ball in Carter-Lane. Homer in a nutshell, or, His War between the frogs and the mice in three cantos / parapharastically translated by Samuel Parker., and The translation of Homers Works into English verse being undertaken by John Ogilby translator of Virgil and paraphrasor on Æsop which work will be of greater charge then [sic] can be expected to be born by him; it being found by computation to amount to neer [sic] 5000 l. He herefore being desirous to spend his time and pains to bring that great and ancient poem into our English version; doth humbly propose to all honorable personages, encouragers of art and learning, an expedient for the publishing of the said work, as followeth..

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, troy, son, sea, pallas, jove, gods, father, war, town, telemachus, sun, ship, mother, menelaus, ithaca, hall, greeks, fate, eumaeus, city, agamemnon, achilles, wine, wall, vlysses, ulysses, trojans, towne, thy, tent, tei, tcp, suiters, stranger, state, spear, sonne, sire, ships, shield, queene, prince, priam, parties, paris, odysses, night, nestor, neptune

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 said, and Homer in a nutshell, or, His War between the frogs and the mice in three cantos / parapharastically translated by Samuel Parker. 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?":

men, man, t, hand, way, house, vlysses, ship, day, hands, head, life, none, death, place, ships, time, rest, gods, ground, heart, words, ulysses, home, fire, friends, eyes, wine, night, ▪, mind, bed, field, wooers, side, sight, people, self, body, part, blood, end, things, achilles, name, faire, wife, water, shore, nothing

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, be, is, said, had, did, were, are, have, made, went, come, see, let, came, go, make, do, take, know, set, put, stood, done, brought, tell, lay, stay, been, say, sent, left, am, laid, saw, took, give, has, gone, being, thought, think, slain, fell, bring, fight, gave, stand, ''s, hear

Proper Nouns

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

〉, ◊, 〈, son, jove, ●, gods, trojans, father, greeks, hector, ulysses, god, achilles, troy, thou, pallas, spear, king, sea, telemachus, t, agamemnon, menelaus, th, patroclus, nestor, argives, ajax, neptune, vp, ioue, haue, suiters, town, hath, mother, eumaeus, court, juno, ye, sun, fate, priam, thy, bow, shield, apollo, phoebus, ships

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?"

his, he, i, you, my, him, they, their, her, it, me, your, them, she, we, our, thy, us, himself, thee, themselves, ''s, mine, vvith, one, theirs, vp, yours, ''em, ours, its, ye, us''d, hers, ts, th, ●, whereof, vvhat, l, itself, em, dy''d, vvest, u, ty''d, threatn''d, thou, theseus, t''himself

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?"

great, good, other, many, such, more, much, old, best, dead, same, little, high, first, mighty, long, wise, own, full, most, ill, strong, free, last, true, fit, fair, rich, sacred, whole, safe, ready, better, sweet, sad, sure, bad, vain, angry, young, greater, afraid, least, haue, proud, past, new, golden, bright, right

then, not, so, now, thus, there, here, out, still, yet, up, well, away, first, again, in, as, more, down, too, therefore, much, off, never, on, most, home, together, long, all, no, forth, far, back, before, very, quickly, once, else, alone, only, also, onely, soon, ever, close, by, presently, quite, hence

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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