Distant Reader - catholic-pamphlets

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 2020-12-13 by Eric Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>. The carrel was created using the Distant Reader zip2carrel 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 1,659,015 words long. Each item in the study carrel is, on average, 21,000 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 83. 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:

church, fo, one, may, will, made, great, time, st, men, many, yet, de, king, fuch, much, fome, god, now, ireland, thofe, new, two, us, bishop, rev, father, mr, england, thefe, good, man, without, though, catholic, lord, parliament, make, might, well, th, part, years, people, day, ad, fhould, life, holy, sir

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are: 1) The civil warres of Great Britain and Ireland : Containing an exact history of their occasion, originall, progress, and happy end / By an impartiall pen., 2) Some considerations touching the usefulnesse of experimental naturall philosophy : propos''d in familiar discourses to a friend, by way of invitation to the study of it., and 3) History of the Catholic Church in the United States : from the earliest settlement of the country to the present time : with biographical sketches, accounts of religious orders, councils / by Henry de Courcy and John Gilmary Shea ; with the approbation of John, Cardinal McCloskey..

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

united states, catholic church, new york, fo much, right rev, notre dame, holy cross, de la, true church, one hundred, fo many, certain letters, south bend, mean time, holy see, fo great, two hundred, many years, sir john, per annum, fo far, next day, lord lieutenant, thoufand pounds, let us, fay th, irish rebellion, new orleans, john milton, two years, fir ft, two houfes, bishop flaget, sir robert, ew york, five hundred, political anatomy, thefe things, tells us, young men, sacred heart, thought fit, bishop carroll, sir william, three years, first bishop, three hundred, rituale romanum, next morning, great britain

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are: 1) History of the Catholic Church in the United States : from the earliest settlement of the country to the present time : with biographical sketches, accounts of religious orders, councils / by Henry de Courcy and John Gilmary Shea ; with the approbation of John, Cardinal McCloskey., 2) Sketches of the early Catholic missions of Kentucky : from their commencement in 1787, to the jubilee of 1826-7 : embracing a summary of the early history of the state, the adventures of the first Catholic emigrants, biographical notices of the early missionaries, the early history of the principal Protestant sects in Kentucky, with some account of the establishment of the Episcopal see at Bardstown, of the various religious societies, and of the general state of the Catholic religion in Kentucky / compiled from authentic sources, with the assistance of the Very Rev. Stephen Theodore Badin ... by M.J. Spalding., and 3) Memoirs of the Right Reverend Simon Wm. Gabriel Bruté, D.D., first bishop of Vincennes; with sketches describing his recollections of scenes connected with the French revolution, and extracts from his journal by the Rt. Rev. James Roosevelt Bayley..

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:

ireland, man, england, god, church, �, lord, kingdom, king, st. joseph, st. mary, people, j, council, world, lord lieutenant, life, king james, fo, law, king charles, father, � �, year, sir, rev. father, rebellion, parliament, notre dame, mr., men, majefty, lord primate, government, friend, de, book, army, � l �, work, true church, time, st., sir robert, sir john, roman church, papifts, non, mount st. mary, majefties

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 church, and West American plants. 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?":

time, men, •, part, church, e, i, years, day, man, r, t, others, people, fame, things, way, place, life, o, year, p, thing, order, ad, religion, death, faith, parts, power, thofe, nothing, diocese, number, name, churches, body, h, priests, _, manner, kings, land, l, work, priest, words, themfelves, tion, thefe

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, be, is, had, were, have, are, been, being, made, do, did, having, make, has, found, hath, came, give, taken, take, come, put, brought, given, done, know, left, am, think, called, according, took, received, let, thought, find, gave, go, went, laid, began, known, faid, ing, appointed, died, fee, lay, became

Proper Nouns

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

�, Church, God, •, St., fome, King, Ireland, J, Father, England, Rev., Mr., Parliament, Lord, Bishop, j, t, thofe, Sir, Kingdom, John, fuch, f, _, de, M., New, Army, e, m, u, Catholics, againft, Holy, fay, c., ut, r, Council, thefe, i, Lords, Sisters, M, France, ., General, S., States

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?"

his, he, it, i, they, their, them, him, we, you, our, my, me, her, us, your, its, she, himself, himfelf, themselves, thy, theirs, 'em, itself, thee, one, myself, em, herself, mine, unlefs, yours, u, withal, fhe, ours, ourselves, ye, s, thither, mention'd, hers, yon, to¬, him, 's, suc, him-, i-

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, great, many, more, own, good, much, new, whole, true, fuch, little, first, catholic, few, feveral, able, old, next, former, same, long, common, religious, certain, young, better, full, large, such, poor, particular, greater, faid, late, last, french, very, fit, high, general, holy, early, only, several, present, free, like, moft, ready

not, then, now, very, only, more, up, as, there, out, well, so, yet, thus, here, much, fo, even, therefore, never, too, ever, again, far, down, about, in, together, often, most, away, soon, indeed, also, long, rather, however, off, already, over, once, on, all, still, perhaps, onely, immediately, afterwards, before, always

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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