Distant Reader - georgeHenty-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 2021-01-23 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 2,577,318 words long. Each item in the study carrel is, on average, 95,456 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 84. 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:

will, said, one, two, men, now, time, us, well, see, way, may, good, three, made, think, get, take, shall, go, first, great, man, know, come, must, day, back, much, long, place, little, might, came, like, away, sir, make, soon, many, captain, say, work, young, going, fire, got, went, just, without

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are: 1) In Greek waters : a story of the Grecian war of independence (1821-1827) by G. A. Henty ; illustrations by W. S. Stacey, 2) At Agincourt : a tale of the white hoods of Paris by G.A. Henty ; with 12 illustrations by Wal. Paget, and 3) The lion of St. Mark : a tale of Venice by G.A. Henty ; illustrations by Gordon Browne.

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

crown vo, page illustrations, will take, old flag, will go, let us, next morning, cloth elegant, olivine edges, next day, hundred yards, sir john, short time, young colonists, good deal, will see, two hundred, harry said, two days, thousand men, three days, two men, first place, will give, bonnie prince, will make, will come, irish brigade, will find, short distance, fell back, prince charlie, will get, hour later, famous battles, three hundred, greek waters, sir eustace, several times, white cross, last night, xixth century, will tell, charlie said, gordon browne, long time, sikh war, come back, every one, one day

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are: 1) In the heart of the Rockies : a story of adventure in Colorado by G.A. Henty ; with eight full-page illustrations by G.C. Hindley, 2) By England''s aid, or, The freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) by G. A. Henty ; illustrations by Alfred Pearse, and 3) A Jacobite exile : being the adventures of a young Englishman in the service of Charles XII of Sweden by G. A. Henty ; illustrations by Paul Hardy.

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:

mr. henty, g. a. henty, france, little time, illustration, g. manville fenn, english, british, tom, paris, mr. fenn, long time, hard time, gordon browne, french, armed men, young men, true, time harry, swedish, st. john, spanish, spaniards, sir john oldcastle, sir john, sikh war, second time, present time, page illustration, orange anl green, orange, night ned, mr. jackson, morning ned, morning dick, morning charlie, modern greek, master ned, king james, jack, irish regiment, irish brigade, indombonnib prince charlie, indians, greek work, greek spirit, greek ship, greek revival, greek ideal, greek fleet

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 A chapter of adventures, or, Through the bombardment of Alexandria by G. A. Henty ; illustrations by W.H. Overend 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:

said, time, good - In the heart of the Rockies : a story of adventure in Colorado by G.A. Henty ; with eight full-page illustrations by G.C. Hindley
men, said, time - Famous battles of the nineteenth century described by Archibald Forbes, George A. Henty, Major Arthur Griffiths, and other well-known writers; ed. by Charles Welsh ...
said, men, time - At Agincourt : a tale of the white hoods of Paris by G.A. Henty ; with 12 illustrations by Wal. Paget
said, men, time - The cat of Bubastes : a tale of ancient Egypt By G. A. Henty, with eight full-page illustrations by J. R. Weguelin
francis, art, polani - Greek lines and other architectural essays by Henry Van Brunt

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?":

men, time, way, man, day, place, night, fire, father, side, water, nothing, troops, work, morning, one, army, town, days, people, life, house, force, boat, head, country, hour, enemy, hand, king, part, others, years, officers, party, news, order, course, guns, position, board, river, end, boys, hands, moment, horses, boy, horse, war

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, had, is, be, have, were, said, are, been, do, has, see, made, think, get, take, go, did, know, am, come, came, being, make, say, got, going, went, taken, heard, done, took, found, put, give, brought, tell, told, sent, left, saw, asked, thought, having, find, keep, seen, 's, let, passed

Proper Nouns

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

Mr., Sir, Ned, Harry, Charlie, Captain, England, Tom, Malcolm, John, English, Rupert, Francis, Colonel, Godfrey, France, Horace, General, Crown, Mrs., Gervaise, Frank, Percy, Guy, Paris, St., Spaniards, Ronald, French, Jack, Amuba, Indians, Dick, Walter, Desmond, Turks, G., Lord, Duke, Chebron, de, Martyn, William, Jethro, Geoffrey, NORTH, Henty, Charles, London, Luka

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, it, he, you, they, his, we, their, them, him, my, your, her, me, us, she, our, its, himself, themselves, myself, yourself, one, itself, ourselves, 'em, herself, yours, yon, mine, theirs, ours, ye, aught, yer, thee, him-, ex-, 's, thy, hers, our-, em, oi, yourselves, hisself, my-, hor-, hither, as-

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?"

other, good, great, little, many, few, more, first, young, last, own, old, long, able, much, better, sure, best, next, strong, full, such, large, same, small, english, several, ready, short, true, heavy, likely, whole, most, glad, bad, french, right, high, possible, new, present, open, british, quiet, white, dark, dead, terrible, general

not, up, so, out, now, then, down, as, here, n't, there, well, once, off, again, very, only, on, back, away, soon, just, in, even, more, still, too, never, however, over, far, indeed, all, much, enough, long, always, most, ever, first, almost, already, later, forward, therefore, together, no, about, also, quite

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.