hawthorne-from-gutenberg

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 2021-01-08 by Eric Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>. The carrel was created using the Distant Reader gutenberg process, and the input was the result of a query applied to a local mirror of Project Gutenberg -- author:"Hawthorne, Nathaniel" NOT title:childish NOT title:volume NOT title:index NOT 32242 NOT 9205 NOT 9206 NOT 9201 NOT 9202 NOT 9239 NOT 9253 NOT 9252 NOT 9207 NOT 9221 NOT 9230 NOT 9233 NOT 9249 NOT 9210 NOT 9234 NOT 9216 NOT 9219 NOT 9223 NOT 9224 NOT 9218 NOT 9242 NOT 9246 NOT 9225 NOT 9212 NOT 9209 NOT 9245 NOT 508. Then, for future reference, the results were saved to a Zip file complete with rudimentary bibliographics. The name of the file is input-file.zip. The Zip file was then unpacked and the contents saved to a cache as well as a directory 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 19 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,339,417 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 70,495 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 73. 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:

one, old, little, now, man, said, like, great, two, will, might, us, much, good, many, life, long, time, see, made, may, yet, well, seemed, never, though, must, still, day, mr, people, another, way, among, first, came, even, hand, young, house, come, ever, world, face, saw, found, whole, went, side, heart

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Passages from the English Notebooks, Complete, Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete, and Twice Told Tales.

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

young man, old man, new england, one another, great deal, hester prynne, years ago, great many, one side, let us, old woman, hundred years, good deal, great stone, scarlet letter, long ago, stone face, young men, said septimius, many years, ever since, nothing else, golden fleece, good many, doubt whether, showed us, ethan brand, looked like, old gentleman, roger chillingworth, little pearl, young lady, told us, aunt keziah, set forth, must needs, human life, mother ceres, either side, anything else, years old, little boy, good old, little girl, next day, little way, led us, king pluto, thousand years, young woman

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Twice Told Tales A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, for Girls and Boys, and Septimius Felton, or, the Elixir of Life.

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:

mr., man, old, england, new, little, great, look, dr., english, sir, mrs., mother, life, lady, king, good, god, american, william, wakefield, ulysses, theseus, street, stone, st., queen, proserpina, pluto, peter, miss, mayor, lord, london, like, letter, jason, j-----, house, hotel, hercules, golden, giant, georgiana, face, ethan, ernest, englishman, earl, drowne

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 old, and The Blithedale Romance 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:

1. old - The Scarlet Letter
2. old - Passages from the English Notebooks, Complete
3. little - A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, for Girls and Boys

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:

1. old, little, great - Passages from the English Notebooks, Complete
2. said, man, old - The Scarlet Letter
3. old, man, said - Twice Told Tales
4. little, king, said - A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, for Girls and Boys
5. semitransparent, tomkius, clinches - Fancy''s Show-Box (From "Twice Told Tales")

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?":

man, life, time, people, day, way, world, hand, heart, side, nothing, face, years, house, men, eyes, woman, head, part, place, child, room, door, mother, stone, church, town, children, moment, mind, something, street, country, aspect, one, earth, air, things, figure, death, voice, morning, water, nature, days, kind, friend, marble, feet, truth

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, been, are, has, said, do, being, see, made, seemed, did, came, come, saw, found, went, looked, make, seen, think, know, take, took, looking, look, go, am, say, let, left, find, stood, put, set, having, felt, thought, answered, heard, cried, give, tell, seems, passed, done

Proper Nouns

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

mr., england, septimius, king, thou, zenobia, hester, new, st., jason, dr., london, heaven, hollingsworth, mrs., pearl, peter, english, middleton, theseus, ellen, priscilla, cadmus, j-----, great, sir, proserpina, old, america, edward, street, prynne, rome, house, queen, god, lord, hall, hercules, _, mother, miss, rose, john, ------, ernest, abbey, american, lady, dimmesdale

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, his, i, he, her, we, you, their, my, him, they, she, its, them, me, our, us, himself, your, itself, themselves, myself, herself, ourselves, thy, one, thee, yourself, mine, thyself, yours, hers, theirs, ours, ye, yourselves, theseus, whence, thou, manner,--"of, celebrated,--his, ''s, woman,--her, with,--who, whispered,--, waist,--the, these:--, taverns,--our, system,--the, street,--our

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?"

old, little, other, great, own, good, many, such, more, young, much, whole, same, long, beautiful, poor, first, few, last, small, better, large, human, new, white, high, strange, english, full, ancient, least, dark, black, rich, several, deep, very, certain, pleasant, true, bright, best, wild, open, dead, most, cold, gray, present, short

not, so, very, now, up, as, more, then, here, out, never, down, still, only, too, even, again, ever, there, well, most, however, away, yet, perhaps, far, just, almost, much, long, once, quite, indeed, back, all, rather, enough, thus, off, often, soon, really, forth, no, together, always, sometimes, hardly, in, first

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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