Distant Reader - slavery-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 2021-04-18 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 -- subject:slavery. 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 170 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 12,025,480 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 74,692 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 77. 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, de, will, time, slavery, slaves, us, mr, slave, states, now, man, made, men, may, two, people, old, general, great, day, good, house, every, state, much, never, come, little, shall, new, free, well, right, years, white, first, see, must, like, many, go, know, south, war, work, country, place, without, make

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus, The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 3 of 4, and Project Gutenberg Edition of The Memoirs of Four Civil War Generals.

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

united states, new york, south carolina, white folks, years old, let us, north carolina, southern states, slave states, white man, slave trade, new orleans, one hundred, one day, years ago, old man, free states, long time, two years, colored people, next day, de white, new england, de war, come back, west indies, civil war, three years, two hundred, white men, general grant, next morning, fugitive slave, person interviewed, one time, general government, great britain, every one, every man, short time, white people, five years, old master, run away, five hundred, four years, twenty years, abolish slavery, supreme court, every day

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Project Gutenberg Edition of The Memoirs of Four Civil War Generals The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus, and Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F. A. Sandford December Term, 1856..

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., slave, god, states, south, new, north, united, slavery, man, union, england, congress, virginia, lord, constitution, john, york, mrs., carolina, war, miss, southern, county, st., old, house, dr., general, american, government, georgia, west, mississippi, africa, yankees, society, christian, chapter, washington, president, footnote, free, mary, come, negro, maryland, indians, bible, uncle

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 Slavery 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 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:

states, slavery, general - The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 1 of 4
said, man, time - My Kalulu, Prince, King and Slave: A Story of Central Africa
slaves, slave, people - The Planters of Colonial Virginia
dey, dat, old - Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume XI, North Carolina Narratives, Part 1
indian, _footnote_, indians - The American Indian as Slaveholder and Seccessionist An Omitted Chapter in the Diplomatic History of the Southern Confederacy

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?":

time, slaves, man, slave, men, slavery, people, day, years, country, place, master, way, power, house, law, night, children, life, part, mother, work, war, state, right, property, nothing, days, hand, land, father, others, name, negroes, things, year, government, hands, freedom, case, one, laws, side, states, thing, number, head, persons, folks, world

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

Proper Nouns

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

_, mr., de, states, general, south, dey, god, united, dat, new, congress, virginia, union, state, north, constitution, john, miss, slavery, house, carolina, �, c., england, war, mrs., president, lord, york, government, washington, dr., georgia, america, negro, ., footnote, slave, west, st., district, lincoln, society, james, indians, george, mississippi, thomas, thou

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, his, they, their, we, my, you, them, him, her, me, our, she, its, us, your, himself, themselves, ''em, myself, itself, thy, ourselves, herself, em, one, thee, yourself, mine, yours, ours, sho, theirs, ye, thyself, jus, ''s, hisself, yourselves, hers, uv, ob, yer, i''m, iv, clo''es, oneself, duh

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?"

other, old, such, great, good, own, same, little, free, many, white, more, first, much, few, last, young, large, whole, long, poor, new, several, general, small, public, true, present, human, southern, black, full, next, big, colored, most, common, better, right, best, negro, necessary, high, certain, only, different, strong, possible, able, american

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

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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