Distant Reader - author-witherGeorge-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 59 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,406,561 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 23,840 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 95. 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:

may, will, shall, god, yet, now, men, make, though, one, much, many, haue, things, doth, us, good, doe, let, might, made, well, man, like, see, time, lord, yea, know, without, great, also, therefore, first, day, take, oh, come, must, say, whose, still, true, way, done, vs, others, cause, long, world

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Britain''s remembrancer containing a narration of the plague lately past; a declaration of the mischiefs present; and a prediction of iudgments to come; (if repentance prevent not.) It is dedicated (for the glory of God) to posteritie; and, to these times (if they please) by Geo: Wither., A collection of emblemes, ancient and moderne quickened vvith metricall illustrations, both morall and divine: and disposed into lotteries, that instruction, and good counsell, may bee furthered by an honest and pleasant recreation. By George VVither. The first booke., and The Psalmes of David translated into lyrick-verse, according to the scope, of the original. And illustrated, with a short argument, and a briefe prayer, or meditation; before, & after, every Psalme. By George Wither.

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

oh lord, early english, english books, roman non, books online, let us, page images, text creation, creation partnership, oh god, wee may, let vs, iesus christ, god will, george wither, god shall, will make, may bee, make us, many times, thine owne, shall make, may make, characters represented, represented either, image sets, tcp schema, will never, shall see, among us, holy ghost, ere long, every thing, every one, long time, mine owne, haue beene, take heed, long since, shall come, haue done, make vs, might haue, far forth, thine emblem, ever since, without asking, many thousands, praise god, providing financial

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The touchstone, or, Trial of tobacco whether it be good for all constitutions : with a word of advice against immoderate drinking and smoaking : likewise examples of some that have drunk their lives away, and died suddenly : with King Jame''s [sic] opinion of tobacco, and how it came first into England : also the first original of coffee : to which is added, witty poems about tobacco and coffe [sic] : something about tobacco, written by George Withers, the late famous poet ... Iuuenilia. A collection of those poemes which were heretofore imprinted, and written by George wither, and Vox & lacrimæ anglorum, or, The true English-men''s complaints to their representatives in Parliament humbly tendred to their serious consideration at their next sitting, February the 6th, 1667/8..

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, god, man, thy, king, thou, haue, good, gods, thee, lord, love, law, church, english, truth, world, thing, shall, people, justice, hath, doe, soul, parliament, mercy, land, grace, foes, state, song, reason, power, nations, nation, like, doth, christ, mercies, men, loue, laws, know, great, day, court, conscience, common, city, christian

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 thy, and The shepheards pipe 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, things, man, time, t, day, doth, way, others, hath, thy, none, ▪, heart, life, thing, place, part, world, thee, times, power, words, selfe, nothing, name, yea, people, cause, reason, hand, body, end, death, art, self, nature, text, praise, love, grace, respect, eyes, mind, sin, rest, peace, owne, friends, vaine

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:

be, is, are, have, was, were, had, make, did, do, let, made, see, know, been, take, being, come, am, say, done, ''s, haue, said, give, doe, hath, thought, bring, according, makes, brought, think, find, found, become, set, sing, thou, keep, thinke, tell, lost, grow, bee, pray, left, having, vnto, fall

Proper Nouns

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

god, thou, ●, lord, hath, doe, thy, yea, haue, 〉, christ, ◊, wee, king, gods, 〈, tcp, church, law, thee, hast, t, owne, loue, c., song, bee, emblem, doth, grace, english, man, shall, holy, kingdom, le, spirit, justice, love, george, earth, hee, text, thine, world, wither, mercy, mee, foes, soul

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, they, it, their, his, my, he, them, our, we, thy, me, you, him, her, your, us, thee, she, themselves, himself, mine, its, theirs, vp, one, yours, ours, ''s, ye, vvith, yt, vnto, hers, vvhat, s, thou, gods, l, urg''d, ay, yee, us''d, ourselves, myself, ●, whereof, ts, saw''st, wr

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, many, other, more, good, much, great, same, own, true, most, first, little, best, last, better, few, common, haue, doth, free, greater, due, full, old, least, long, whole, wise, roman, new, false, high, -, non, present, worse, wicked, like, greatest, honest, holy, able, strong, ill, private, outward, rich, early, late

not, so, then, now, more, as, yet, well, also, therefore, here, much, still, thus, there, too, out, most, away, up, onely, first, never, else, ever, long, rather, very, together, quite, thereby, forth, perhaps, only, thereof, far, in, often, even, alone, heretofore, no, once, vs, oft, just, likewise, indeed, before, all

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.