Distant Reader - subject-astronomy-freebo

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 2021-05-24 by Eric Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>. The carrel was created using the Distant Reader zip2carrel process, and the input was a Zip file locally cached with the name input-file.zip. Documents in the Zip file have been saved in a cache, and each of them have been transformed & saved as a set 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 22 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,231,359 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 55,970 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 94. 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:

may, one, will, sun, earth, first, two, degrees, place, time, shall, find, line, must, stars, therefore, motion, meridian, hour, angle, yet, water, day, circle, side, part, sine, great, also, altitude, parts, now, distance, de, found, horizon, much, point, given, according, called, right, air, made, globe, latitude, see, many, declination, reason

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The sphere of Marcus Manilius made an English poem with annotations and an astronomical appendix / by Edward Sherburne, Esquire., A discourse concerning a new world & another planet in 2 bookes., and Natural philosophy improven by new experiments touching the mercurial weather-glass, the hygroscope, eclipsis, conjunctions of Saturn and Jupiter, by new experiments, touching the pressure of fluids, the diving-bell, and all the curiosities thereof : to which is added some new observations, and experiments, lately made of several kinds : together with a true relation of an evil spirit, which troubled a mans family for many days : lastly, there is a large discourse anent coal, coal-sinks, dipps, risings, and streeks of coal, levels running of mines, gaes, dykes, damps, and wild-fire / by G.S..

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

right ascension, fixed stars, versed sine, equal parts, put forth, one foot, versed sines, right angled, will find, must needs, nearest distance, one another, right angles, suns declination, meridian altitude, hour lines, angled spherical, angle sought, suns altitude, let us, meridian line, hour circle, english books, true place, early english, given angle, spherical triangle, set forth, like manner, side sought, many degrees, may see, suns place, nothing else, anni post, north pole, primum mobile, golden number, books online, post christum, tell us, given side, greatest declination, middle motion, longest day, great circle, right line, first meridian, half sum, right angle

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Cosmographia, or, A view of the terrestrial and cœlestial globes in a brief explanation of the principles of plain and solid geometry applied to surveying and gauging of cask : the doctrine of primum mobile : with an account of the Juilan & Gregorian calendars, and the computation of the places of the sun, moon, and fixed stars ... : to which is added an introduction unto geography / by John Newton ... The first lecture of an introduction to cosmographie: being a description of all the vvorld. Read publiquely at Sr. Balthazar Gerbiers academy. Imprimatur, Hen: Scobell, Cleric: Parliamenti., and A second defence of the New theory of the earth from the exceptions of Mr. John Keill. By William Whiston, M.A. vicar of Lowestoft, Suffolk; and chaplain to the Right Reverend Father in God, John Lord Bishop of Norwich.

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:

sun, earth, stars, planets, meridian, moon, world, tcp, sunne, horizon, day, suns, pole, latitude, heaven, globe, ecliptick, circle, air, year, sea, poet, north, motion, heavens, god, east, zenith, west, water, theory, starres, sphere, south, signs, scripture, reason, quadrant, point, place, parts, night, nature, moone, mercury, manilius, line, hour, glass, ghost

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 sun, and The new planet no planet, or, The earth no wandring star, except in the wandring heads of Galileans here out of the principles of divinity, philosophy, astronomy, reason, and sense, the earth''s immobility is asserted : the true sense of Scripture in this point, cleared : the fathers and philosophers vindicated : divers theologicall and philosophicall points handled, and Copernicus his opinion, as erroneous, ridiculous, and impious, fully refuted / by Alexander Rosse ; in answer to a discourse, that the earth may be a planet. 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:

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?":

degrees, time, side, place, part, motion, day, parts, distance, line, stars, reason, angle, earth, difference, point, t, foot, hour, d, way, weight, things, altitude, hours, others, body, air, year, number, declination, lines, b, sides, e, end, minutes, light, degree, years, p., sine, example, opinion, man, thread, days, inches, planets, table

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:

is, be, are, have, was, being, were, find, said, found, given, called, according, made, see, make, do, had, say, been, take, set, let, know, having, did, ''s, sought, come, give, suppose, move, draw, put, wrote, rising, drawn, seen, taken, published, fall, observed, placed, divided, added, cut, following, fixed, answer, hath

Proper Nouns

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

〉, ◊, 〈, sun, earth, meridian, circle, water, horizon, de, globe, moon, c., latitude, heaven, sine, suns, north, l., pole, b, hour, star, radius, south, quadrant, c, world, altitude, stars, line, i., mercury, east, heavens, e., hath, air, angle, center, sunne, a, declination, azimuth, west, moone, f, triangle, sines, ●

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, you, he, they, their, we, them, its, your, our, her, him, us, my, she, me, themselves, himself, ''s, thy, ''em, ours, one, thee, theirs, mine, l, em, yours, whereof, ♓, ∷, itself, †, vp, us''d, shou''d, 01″, ye, s, iu, herself, hers, ha, ♒, ♃, ♀, ☊

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, same, first, great, many, such, more, equal, true, greater, second, whole, much, several, right, little, third, former, own, new, common, less, last, greatest, fourth, small, lesser, most, middle, high, full, next, opposite, like, different, proper, particular, able, least, good, distant, certain, long, nearest, natural, large, general, bright, lower, present

not, so, then, therefore, also, now, as, more, only, thus, up, first, very, likewise, here, down, out, most, yet, well, there, much, before, together, thereof, never, still, sometimes, again, forth, far, rather, about, too, even, that, else, onely, easily, is, consequently, hence, long, off, above, ever, just, all, less, exactly

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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