Distant Reader - cookbooks-from-hathi

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 2021-01-26 by Eric Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>. The carrel was created using the Distant Reader trust process, and the input was a HaithTrust metadata (TSV) file locally cached with the name metadata.tsv. Given the metadata file, associated PDF documents where saved to a a cache and a second set of documents were saved to a set of plain text files. All of the analysis -- "reading" -- has been done against the 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

The study carrel is 13,646,188 words long. Each item in the study carrel is, on average, 90,974 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 illustrate the overall size of the study 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 88. 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 illustrate the overall readability of the study 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, put, de, water, two, butter, half, salt, sugar, add, little, la, will, well, boil, sauce, take, cut, eggs, three, flour, may, cold, les, pour, let, milk, small, dish, pound, cream, pepper, hot, serve, make, minutes, pint, fire, le, und, good, four, white, pan, bread, place, boiling, fine, large, lemon

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are: 1) The cook''s dictionary, and house-keeper''s directory: a new family manual of cookery and confectionery, on a plan of ready reference, never hitherto attempted By Richard Dolby , 2) Practical housekeeping. A careful compilation of tried and approved recipes ... , and 3) The cook''s own book, and housekeeper''s register. Being receipts for cooking of every kind of meat, fish, and fowl; and making every sort of soup, gravy, pastry, preserves, and essences. With a complete system of confectionery; tables for marketing; a book of carving; and Miss Leslie''s seventy-five receipts for pastry, cakes, and sweetmeats By a Boston housekeeper .

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

cold water, boiling water, de la, little salt, two ounces, ten minutes, one pound, melted butter, one cup, one pint, five minutes, two hours, twenty minutes, well together, two eggs, fresh butter, hot water, one quart, dans une, bread crumbs, one hour, one ounce, three eggs, four eggs, un peu, thin slices, two pounds, well beaten, white wine, add one, cook book, small pieces, baking powder, will make, three hours, powdered sugar, slow fire, inch thick, four ounces, de veau, moderate oven, four hours, two quarts, peu de, little water, chopped parsley, warm water, add two, one teaspoonful, sweet milk

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are: 1) Good-living : a practical cookery-book for town and country / by Sara Van Buren Brugière , 2) Practical housekeeping. A careful compilation of tried and approved recipes ... , and 3) Mrs. Rorer''s Philadelphia cook book : a manual of home economics / by S.T. Rorer .

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 study carrel include:

boil, egg, water, little water, butter, salt, pudding, sugar, add, half, little cold water, sauce, cream, soup, little, meat, fish, cut, cake, little warm water, little boiling water, flour, pound, milk, dish, little butter, good, little salt, french, cold water, hour, small, salt water, hot water, beef, little fresh butter, bread, pie, little pepper, cup, sufficient cold water, little sugar, little flour, white, table, little rose water, pint, ounce, little good gravy, lemon

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 water, and The new century cook book : compiled from recipes contributed by ladies of Chicago and other cities and towns, and published for the benefit of Wesley Hospital, Chicago c.1 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 your 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 the 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?":

water, butter, salt, sugar, eggs, flour, sauce, milk, dish, pepper, minutes, pound, cream, fire, pint, pan, hour, meat, bread, lemon, time, half, oven, table, cup, juice, fish, egg, hours, pieces, paste, ounces, gravy, slices, beef, parsley, quarter, spoonful, vinegar, wine, soup, boiling, piece, yolks, quart, onions, way, place, season, teaspoonful

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, put, are, add, take, cut, have, boil, let, serve, make, pour, made, stir, boiled, done, mix, has, cover, do, bake, set, was, beat, been, lay, keep, place, used, beaten, die, boiling, chopped, being, strain, turn, fry, grated, remove, rub, drain, fill, see, wash, served, simmer, cook, roll, use

Proper Nouns

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

la, de, un, mit, et, le, au, und, les, du, der, que, zu, c., Sauce, Mrs., ein, den, vous, ou, von, das, Butter, werden, à, eine, y, auf, wird, es, Pudding, einem, oder, ne, dem, fie, Cake, il, sie, des, dann, nicht, bis, Soup, ib, aux, ., einer, sel, och

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, them, they, you, i, your, their, we, its, her, he, his, she, our, my, me, him, us, themselves, itself, one, himself, herself, myself, yourself, ourselves, thy, sea-, yours, thee, mine, ours, theirs, pos-, hers, yon, be-, 'em, ex-, ye, em, tt, s, orna-, und, aught, hem, des-, oneself, withal

Below are words cloud of the 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 this study carrel positive or negative?"

little, cold, small, hot, good, large, white, same, other, fine, few, fresh, thick, more, sweet, thin, brown, best, ready, dry, warm, much, clean, many, whole, green, soft, light, great, nice, clear, sufficient, half, young, new, smooth, possible, first, rich, tender, cool, red, such, old, full, stiff, french, long, strong, last

then, not, very, well, up, out, in, as, off, together, so, over, about, also, quite, only, too, more, enough, thoroughly, again, just, gently, all, down, on, carefully, first, most, much, now, always, nearly, never, soon, slowly, away, rather, once, fine, often, even, instead, thus, perfectly, hard, lightly, quickly, gradually, long

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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