Distant Reader - author-howeJohn-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 37 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,010,835 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 27,319 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:

god, will, may, us, one, things, self, thing, shall, much, great, man, yet, must, men, therefore, now, good, world, make, also, lord, love, spirit, made, way, soul, doth, selves, time, without, life, christ, state, might, many, nothing, every, nature, say, even, power, divine, think, case, religion, another, well, never, let

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The blessednesse of the righteous discoursed from Psal. 17, 15 / by John Howe ..., A treatise of delighting in God from Psal. xxxvij. 4. Delight thy self also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. In two parts. By John Howe, M.A. sometime fellow of Magdalen College, Oxon., and A discourse concerning meekness and quietness of spirit to which is added, A sermon on Acts 28. 22, shewing that the Christian religion is not a sect, and yet that it is every where spoken against / by Matthew Henry ....

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

one another, let us, holy ghost, early english, english books, jesus christ, books online, every thing, every one, towards god, mean time, blessed god, present state, text creation, page images, creation partnership, lord jesus, john howe, tells us, christian religion, divine nature, will never, much less, nothing else, de script, characters represented, represented either, tcp schema, image sets, take heed, one thing, god will, two things, many things, take notice, present case, great god, christian church, must needs, good men, new creature, love god, every way, will make, eternal life, great things, among men, among us, good man, now take

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are A plain discourse about rash and sinful anger as a help for such as are willing to be relieved against so sad and too generally prevailing a distemper even amongst professors of religion : being the substance of some sermons preached at Manchester in Lancashire / by Henry Newcome ... The cursed family; or, A short tract, shewing the pernicious influence of wicked prayer-less houses, upon this church and kingdom Humbly tender''d by way of subserviency to His Majesties Royal Proclamations, and Acts of Parliament, for preventing and punishing immorality and prophaness. By THomas Risley Master of Arts, and sometime fellow of Pembrook-Colledge in Oxford. With a prefatory epistle by the reverend Mr. John Howe., and A letter to a friend concerning a postscript to the Defense of Dr. Sherlock''s notion of the Trinity in unity, relating to the Calm and sober enquiry upon the same subject.

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:

god, tcp, lord, spirit, world, man, religion, gospel, thing, law, christian, soul, church, self, divine, christ, men, life, son, holy, people, love, father, trinity, state, psal, government, gods, ghost, earth, covenant, apostle, saviour, redeemer, power, peace, passion, nature, ministers, kingdom, heaven, heart, faith, enquirer, doctrine, doctor, death, creatures, communion, city

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 god, and The cursed family; or, A short tract, shewing the pernicious influence of wicked prayer-less houses, upon this church and kingdom Humbly tender''d by way of subserviency to His Majesties Royal Proclamations, and Acts of Parliament, for preventing and punishing immorality and prophaness. By THomas Risley Master of Arts, and sometime fellow of Pembrook-Colledge in Oxford. With a prefatory epistle by the reverend Mr. John Howe. 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?":

things, thing, self, man, men, way, selves, time, nothing, state, life, case, t, soul, matter, part, glory, world, power, nature, reason, mind, love, others, hath, name, heart, words, one, day, religion, sense, end, body, pleasure, delight, work, death, cause, design, thoughts, purpose, place, being, people, souls, sin, doth, word, course

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, are, have, was, do, were, being, had, been, make, made, said, say, think, did, let, know, take, hath, see, find, done, consider, come, give, having, thought, concerning, according, put, given, doth, taken, live, am, set, found, speak, blessed, go, suppose, become, known, makes, called, speaks, considered, believe, seems

Proper Nouns

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

god, 〉, ◊, 〈, thou, lord, christ, spirit, hath, c., world, church, divine, gospel, heaven, ●, christian, lib, tcp, holy, de, father, soul, man, law, christians, i., son, men, e., religion, text, meekness, jesus, john, nature, love, est, earth, gods, grace, yea, t, power, herein, word, l., life, cor, christianity

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, we, they, him, our, their, them, you, i, us, your, himself, my, its, thy, themselves, me, thee, her, one, she, theirs, ours, yours, mine, ye, whereof, ourselves, yourself, itself, thou, ''em, vvhat, non, judg''d, yourselves, whosoever, unconcern''d, oneself, herself, gods, †, wr, urg''d, unhang''d, ts, tehey, sever''d

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?"

such, own, other, great, more, same, good, many, much, little, present, true, necessary, first, common, former, very, whole, greater, saith, eternal, holy, divine, perfect, possible, most, better, least, capable, glorious, less, certain, natural, full, excellent, last, distinct, plain, general, best, impossible, new, real, fit, apt, latter, sufficient, proper, particular, pleasant

not, so, more, most, only, therefore, now, then, also, very, as, much, yet, even, up, here, never, well, too, ever, thus, out, far, indeed, all, again, otherwise, together, there, rather, somewhat, still, in, less, first, no, down, often, further, else, at, once, that, over, off, away, especially, before, truly, is

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.