Distant Reader - mysteryFiction-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 2021-01-24 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 55,209,342 words long. Each item in the study carrel is, on average, 64,496 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:

said, one, man, mr, will, know, now, see, time, like, little, back, room, well, two, think, way, came, come, must, house, made, door, old, eyes, good, go, just, say, never, face, went, hand, night, mrs, might, much, sir, thought, get, tell, asked, looked, us, first, away, last, miss, long, day

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are: 1) The wandering Jew by Eugene Sue, 2) Night and morning : a novel / by Sir E. Bulwer Lytton., and 3) The omnibus Fleming Stone consisting of Vicky Van, Spooky hollow, The mystery of the sycamore, Curved blades / by Carolyn Wells.

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

young man, last night, old man, new york, two men, said mr, first time, let us, one thing, years ago, come back, came back, just now, young lady, long time, good deal, go back, great deal, one side, next day, one else, ten minutes, five minutes, every one, next morning, front door, scotland yard, went back, said mrs, one day, said nothing, will go, tell us, ever since, will tell, young woman, never seen, turned away, will come, get away, must go, dead man, thousand dollars, one hand, minutes later, one another, door opened, will take, will see, will find

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are: 1) Night and morning : a novel / by Sir E. Bulwer Lytton., 2) Three for Lord Peter Wimsey Dorothy L. Sayers, and 3) The silver blade; the true chronicle of a double mystery by Charles Edmonds Walk; with five illustrations in color by A. B. Wenzell.

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:

man, old man, dead man, new york, good man, little man, young man, chapter, great man, little time, look, london, big man, god, tall man, poor man, rich man, better man, honest man, good, mystery, paris, best man, mr. smith, new man, strange man, small man, second man, like, business man, white man, strong man, house, sick man, right man, mr. jones, looking man, little room, little old man, elderly man, long time, hand, scotland yard, little way, bad man, time, mr. brown, free man, dark man, blind man

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 The eagle''s eye : a true story of the Imperial German government''s spies and intrigues in America from facts furnished by William J. Flynn / novelized by Courtney Ryley Cooper 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, man, mr - The omnibus Fleming Stone consisting of Vicky Van, Spooky hollow, The mystery of the sycamore, Curved blades / by Carolyn Wells
said, man, like - Johnstone of the border by Harold Bindloss ... with frontispiece in color
said, man, did - The wandering Jew by Eugene Sue
said, man, know - The wire devils / by Frank L. Packard
mr, said, man - The mysteries of Udolpho, a romance; interspersed with some pieces of poetry By Ann Radcliffe v.2

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?":

man, time, room, way, eyes, door, night, face, hand, house, nothing, day, thing, moment, woman, something, head, one, men, place, life, voice, girl, case, anything, hands, things, mind, morning, name, side, father, friend, sir, people, money, years, light, words, word, table, course, fact, heart, end, death, matter, business, hour, window

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, have, be, said, do, were, been, did, 's, are, know, see, has, come, think, came, made, go, say, went, am, tell, get, asked, looked, got, found, saw, take, make, thought, knew, seemed, told, turned, let, going, took, left, heard, put, 'm, want, 've, give, find, seen, look

Proper Nouns

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

Mr., Mrs., Miss, Sir, Lady, Dr., M., God, Peter, Lord, London, sir, John, de, New, Captain, George, Inspector, Street, Jack, Mary, Dick, Madame, Jim, Doctor, York, Monsieur, Tom, Paul, Paris, England, Mr, Colonel, St., House, Harry, HOUSE, Charles, Smith, Robert, Van, ing, Arthur, Philip, David, Chief, 'S, James, Henry, William

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, he, you, it, his, her, she, him, me, my, they, we, your, them, their, himself, us, its, our, myself, herself, yourself, one, itself, themselves, mine, 'em, yours, 's, ourselves, hers, thee, thy, ye, ’s, him-, em, theirs, ours, ex-, ’em, yer, d'you, i'm, my-, evi-, be-, you're, pos-, oneself

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, other, good, old, own, more, last, young, great, first, few, same, much, long, sure, such, many, right, new, dead, small, poor, next, open, certain, dear, white, black, better, least, whole, dark, full, able, possible, strange, best, big, true, only, large, second, short, afraid, ready, low, bad, red, high, real

not, n't, so, up, then, out, now, very, here, only, down, just, there, back, never, again, as, too, more, away, even, all, well, still, on, in, once, n’t, off, ever, quite, over, much, yet, most, always, almost, rather, perhaps, far, enough, really, long, soon, suddenly, also, however, first, no, before

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.