Distant Reader - subject-africaWest-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 2021-05-31 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 -- facet_subject:"Africa, West". 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 16 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,681,663 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 105,103 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 78. 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, man, will, two, great, men, little, time, now, people, us, made, river, came, like, go, see, well, day, water, good, way, white, went, king, much, come, may, first, africa, town, long, country, found, many, also, away, must, coast, old, three, place, get, back, mr, west, every, still, make, another

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Travels of Richard and John Lander into the interior of Africa, for the discovery of the course and termination of the Niger From unpublished documents in the possession of the late Capt. John William Barber Fullerton ... with a prefatory analysis of the previous travels of Park, Denham, Clapperton, Adams, Lyon, Ritchie, &c. into the hitherto unexplored countries of Africa, West African studies, and Travels in West Africa: Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons.

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

west africa, sierra leone, white man, west african, white men, west coast, let us, good deal, next day, next morning, gold coast, one day, fernando po, major denham, post office, john dolittle, years ago, dear old, every one, richard lander, go back, following day, went back, old man, short time, come back, young man, two days, every thing, palm oil, one hundred, three days, ja ja, great deal, came back, long time, one side, feet high, cape palmas, will go, every day, following morning, one thing, will see, will find, two hours, first time, per cent, two hundred, boo khaloom

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are West African studies Travels in West Africa: Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons, and Observations Upon the Windward Coast of Africa The religion, character, customs, &c. of the natives; with a system upon which they may be civilized, and a knowledge attained of the interior of this extraordinary quarter of the globe; and upon the natural and commercial resources of the country; made in the years 1805 and 1806; with an appendix, containing a letter to Lord Howick, on the most simple and effectual means of abolishing the slave trade.

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:

man, mr., king, africa, river, english, coast, sierra, leone, french, england, chapter, cape, west, niger, island, great, congo, come, captain, time, south, palmas, lord, illustration, government, gorilla, god, gaboon, fernando, european, british, zaire, st., spanish, sandi, sanders, quengueza, portuguese, porto, point, ochori, new, native, miss, look, leopard, lake, lagos, john

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 Middy of the Slave Squadron: A West African Story 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:

great, people, africa - Travels of Richard and John Lander into the interior of Africa, for the discovery of the course and termination of the Niger From unpublished documents in the possession of the late Capt. John William Barber Fullerton ... with a prefatory analysis of the previous travels of Park, Denham, Clapperton, Adams, Lyon, Ritchie, &c. into the hitherto unexplored countries of Africa
said, man, little - For Jacinta
doctor, said, time - The Pirate Slaver: A Story of the West African Coast
said, leopard, went - Where Animals Talk: West African Folk Lore Tales
river, like, congo - Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo, Volume 2

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, men, time, people, day, water, river, way, country, town, place, king, night, thing, head, house, village, part, one, things, hand, natives, feet, side, days, morning, chief, ship, nothing, sea, trade, tree, forest, canoe, course, miles, women, hands, ground, life, eyes, bones, trees, land, years, face, moment, coast, work, end

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

Proper Nouns

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

_, africa, mr., west, coast, austin, doctor, king, tortoise, leopard, sanders, england, congo, park, jefferson, river, lander, ju, captain, english, african, sierra, |, cape, niger, hut, chapter, leone, hamilton, jacinta, god, lord, clapperton, john, de, dab, bush, calabar, c., government, dr., ja, landers, gaboon, m., south, sir, fetish, mr, major

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, you, their, we, them, him, my, me, her, our, she, its, us, your, himself, themselves, myself, one, itself, ourselves, yourself, herself, mine, yours, ''em, theirs, ours, ''s, ye, em, thee, ya, thy, hers, yew, d''you, you''re, yew''re, pe, i''m, yew''ll, wa, pelf, on''t, hisself, ó

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, great, little, good, white, many, old, more, own, same, few, large, first, long, small, such, black, much, african, native, last, several, next, young, certain, high, big, full, whole, new, dead, poor, human, wild, short, most, fine, ready, open, strong, latter, able, only, different, best, least, better, true, possible, red

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

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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