Distant Reader - subject-childPsychology-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 2021-06-03 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:"Child psychology". 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 5 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 292,739 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 58,547 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 71. 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:

child, children, one, first, life, will, little, may, time, words, must, even, without, also, school, things, often, much, many, day, like, yet, new, boy, play, years, two, made, now, well, see, work, make, sounds, word, great, month, case, week, way, mother, good, means, hand, another, sound, every, young, development, movements

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The Mind of the Child, Part II The Development of the Intellect, International Education Series Edited By William T. Harris, Volume IX., The Child Under Eight, and Children''s Ways Being selections from the author’s "Studies of childhood," with some additional matter.

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

little girl, little boy, nursery school, first time, little children, young children, sunday school, one hundred, two years, good deal, one another, years old, one little, organic sensations, one child, long time, child will, infant school, instinctive movements, fifth week, words heard, young people, fourth week, child may, well known, half years, early childhood, expressive movements, many children, born blind, born deaf, one day, tells us, little child, three years, infant schools, first day, months old, second year, years ago, seventh week, transition class, four years, mental development, first attempts, without words, young child, junior school, human beings, stanley hall

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Children''s Ways Being selections from the author’s "Studies of childhood," with some additional matter The Child Under Eight, and The Mind of the Child, Part II The Development of the Intellect, International Education Series Edited By William T. Harris, Volume IX..

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:

child, time, school, life, god, year, thing, play, mr., little, like, girl, feeling, dr., case, boy, young, world, word, week, way, teacher, syllable, sunday, story, speech, speak, sound, soul, senses, sensations, repeat, professor, period, papa, organic, object, nursery, nature, mother, month, montessori, miss, man, lord, look, london, learn, know, kindergarten

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 child, and The Mind of the Child, Part II The Development of the Intellect, International Education Series Edited By William T. Harris, Volume IX. 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:

children, child, little - The Child Under Eight
child, words, month - The Mind of the Child, Part II The Development of the Intellect, International Education Series Edited By William T. Harris, Volume IX.
life, child, soul - The Unfolding Life A Study of Development with Reference to Religious Training
boys, boy, life - Youth and Sex: Dangers and Safeguards for Girls and Boys
gently, accompanies, occupies - Youth and Sex: Dangers and Safeguards for Girls and Boys

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?":

child, children, life, time, words, things, boy, day, years, mother, word, work, way, week, case, hand, play, sounds, development, something, month, teacher, others, sense, sound, objects, period, school, place, part, self, girl, world, boys, one, means, months, activity, man, experience, people, ideas, eye, head, power, language, speech, idea, cases, syllables

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, was, have, has, had, been, were, do, said, made, make, see, does, come, being, know, say, given, used, give, called, says, did, heard, put, comes, take, asked, speak, go, seems, found, taken, seen, think, become, get, observed, makes, find, understand, born, show, repeated, known, making, told, learn

Proper Nouns

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

_, god, e., school, g., froebel, kindergarten, miss, mr., nursery, fig, i., dr., e, education, sunday, london, infant, mama, schools, s, b, heaven, professor, chapter, t, m, vol, ., ä, christ, m., l, ich, w, kindergartens, nature, mrs., month, mamma, du, d, father, das, ja, d., u, pa, organic, hall

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, he, his, i, they, we, their, him, them, her, its, she, himself, my, you, our, me, us, itself, themselves, one, your, herself, myself, ourselves, mine, thy, ours, oneself, ''s, yourself, thee, hers, yours, thyself, theirs, ten, life"--they, i''m, hisself, em, auf

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?"

little, other, first, own, such, many, same, new, great, good, young, more, much, human, certain, old, different, small, real, right, few, early, general, most, true, second, least, important, whole, large, apt, strong, possible, natural, childish, difficult, long, physical, frequent, best, third, necessary, several, present, common, clear, last, special, simple, interesting

not, so, more, very, only, even, also, often, out, then, now, as, too, most, up, well, here, yet, first, thus, still, far, much, always, again, however, just, sometimes, never, quite, already, once, especially, correctly, later, almost, on, all, down, n''t, less, probably, therefore, frequently, away, perhaps, long, rather, no, soon

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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