Distant Reader - author-wardEdward-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 28 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 200,627 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 7,165 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 94. 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:

will, one, like, tcp, text, good, may, made, man, great, much, english, make, time, shall, now, old, first, without, eebo, two, well, us, house, self, till, tei, many, must, little, yet, every, never, love, take, texts, books, woman, men, early, poor, new, country, london, nothing, give, characters, see, place, encoded

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The world bewitch''d a dialogue between two astrologers and the author : with infallible predictions of what will happen in this present year, 1699, from the vices and villanies practis''d in court, city and country., Labour in vain: or, What signifies little or nothing Viz. I. The poor man''s petitioning at court. II. Expectation of benefit from a covetous man in his life-time. III. The marriage of an old man to a young woman. IV. Endeavours to regulate mens manners by preaching or writing. V. Being a Jacobite. VI. Confining an insolvent debtor. VII. Promise of secrecy in a conspiracy. VIII. An enquiry after a place., and The metamorphos''d beau, or, The intrigues of Ludgate.

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

english books, early english, books online, price six, six pence, page images, creation partnership, text creation, tcp schema, represented either, characters represented, image sets, will never, will remain, first edition, without asking, tcp tei, data within, facilitate morpho, qa standards, tcp data, notably latin, text transcribed, pfs batch, large quantities, monographic english, critical editions, commercial purposes, financial support, create diplomatic, ann arbor, later edition, publisher proquest, using tcp, texts created, text strings, images scanned, online text, every monographic, tcp texts, one copy, remaining illegibles, proquest page, mainly structural, make clear, ascii text, new cambridge, syntactic tagging, lossless xml, partnership web

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The insinuating bawd and the repenting harlot written by a whore at Tunbridge, and dedicated to a bawd at the Bath. The world bewitch''d a dialogue between two astrologers and the author : with infallible predictions of what will happen in this present year, 1699, from the vices and villanies practis''d in court, city and country., and The wealthy shop-keeper, or, The charitable citizen a poem..

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, man, house, tei, pence, english, country, world, woman, town, old, company, wife, sir, people, devil, church, water, room, new, money, men, love, lord, like, laws, land, lady, friend, fair, early, darby, ale, year, women, way, ward, walk, vertue, trade, text, summer, state, stars, souls, sea, scotland, reader, pride, practice

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 like, and A step to the Bath with a character of the place. 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:

like, text, tcp - A journey to Hell, or, A visit paid to the Devil a poem.
like, english, old - A trip to Holland being a description of the country, people and manners : as also some select observations on Amsterdam.
like, time, good - A step to the Bath with a character of the place.
darby, text, tcp - The world bewitch''d a dialogue between two astrologers and the author : with infallible predictions of what will happen in this present year, 1699, from the vices and villanies practis''d in court, city and country.
fathom, imperfect, refuge - A hue and cry after a man-midwife who has lately deliver''d the land-bank of their money.

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?":

t, time, text, self, man, texts, characters, nothing, tho, books, reason, images, xml, work, woman, way, price, day, part, friend, works, author, money, title, place, image, people, others, project, page, elements, edition, keying, encoding, eebo, data, side, thro, thing, mind, country, things, name, women, rest, none, men, eyes, sets, instances

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, have, are, had, were, being, been, made, do, make, ''s, has, did, take, said, give, having, see, encoded, came, am, find, let, think, does, found, put, know, come, go, thought, done, went, tell, took, based, say, says, given, told, began, makes, keep, got, known, gave, sent, believe

Proper Nouns

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

tcp, english, house, man, london, text, tei, eebo, sir, old, oxford, world, town, love, devil, thou, men, ale, head, ward, pence, 〉, new, wife, country, creation, proquest, phase, partnership, lord, church, england, god, woman, fair, edward, court, lady, fortune, company, city, water, t, gentleman, master, king, heaven, character, wit, utf-8

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?"

i, their, his, he, they, you, my, it, her, we, him, your, our, me, she, them, us, ''em, its, themselves, himself, thy, thee, one, em, herself, ''s, yours, mine, us''d, ye, ours, hers, theirs, shou''d, l, wedg''d, wag''d, vvith, uncheck''t, troop''d, thou, tears, pox, perceiv''d, lodg''d, heav''n, gray''s, gorg''d, dy''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?"

good, great, such, more, other, own, many, much, little, first, old, early, same, true, english, poor, last, whole, several, available, full, greater, next, large, general, best, most, short, few, new, sure, better, small, illegible, least, common, young, long, second, free, high, due, usual, possible, only, honest, subject, mighty, hard, false

not, so, as, very, then, up, now, thus, more, well, out, never, too, here, much, therefore, only, ever, most, down, there, in, no, once, still, over, first, on, soon, rather, off, yet, away, enough, again, often, together, almost, just, far, sometimes, also, all, online, indeed, else, long, even, always, sooner

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.