Distant Reader - subject-china-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 10 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,313,805 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 131,380 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 92. 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:

great, one, city, two, china, also, time, made, much, many, first, us, make, province, several, chineses, yet, may, three, tartars, men, day, came, without, like, people, emperor, might, place, will, king, good, well, every, come, little, court, whole, river, sent, another, empire, manner, father, chinese, now, ambassador, hundred, part, take

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Atlas Chinensis being a second part of A relation of remarkable passages in two embassies from the East-India Company of the United Provinces to the vice-roy Singlamong and General Taising Lipovi and to Konchi, Emperor of China and East-Tartary : with a relation of the Netherlanders assisting the Tarter against Coxinga and the Chinese fleet, who till then were masters of the sea : and a more exact geographical description than formerly both of the whole empire of China in general and in particular of every of the fifteen provinces / collected out of their several writings and journals by Arnoldus Montanus ; English''d and adorn''d with above a hundred several sculptures by John Ogilby., An embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces, to the Grand Tartar Cham, Emperor of China deliver''d by their excellencies, Peter de Goyer and Jacob de Keyzer, at his imperial city of Peking : wherein the cities, towns, villages, ports, rivers, &c. in their passages from Canton to Peking are ingeniously describ''d / by Mr. John Nieuhoff ... ; also an epistle of Father John Adams their antagonist, concerning the whole negotiation ; with an appendix of several remarks taken out of Father Athanasius Kircher ; English''d, and set forth with their several sculptures, by John Ogilby Esq. ..., and The history of that great and renowned monarchy of China wherein all the particular provinces are accurately described, as also the dispositions, manners, learning, lawes, militia, government, and religion of the people : together with the traffick and commodities of that countrey / lately written in Italian by F. Alvarez Semedo ... ; now put into English by a person of quality, and illustrated with several mapps and figures ... ; to which is added the history of the late invasion and conquest of that flourishing kingdom by the Tartars ; with an exact account of the other affairs of China till these present times..

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

every one, whole empire, next day, great number, chief city, make use, one another, set sail, two hundred, christian religion, many times, three hundred, next morning, every day, van campen, west side, every thing, one day, east side, short time, hundred thousand, three years, greatest part, great deal, three days, river kiang, mean time, two thousand, long time, made use, yellow river, three leagues, thousand men, every year, like manner, two days, small city, five hundred, great cham, great store, one side, many years, hundred years, take care, great many, years ago, chineses call, north side, great men, roy singlamong

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Atlas Chinensis being a second part of A relation of remarkable passages in two embassies from the East-India Company of the United Provinces to the vice-roy Singlamong and General Taising Lipovi and to Konchi, Emperor of China and East-Tartary : with a relation of the Netherlanders assisting the Tarter against Coxinga and the Chinese fleet, who till then were masters of the sea : and a more exact geographical description than formerly both of the whole empire of China in general and in particular of every of the fifteen provinces / collected out of their several writings and journals by Arnoldus Montanus ; English''d and adorn''d with above a hundred several sculptures by John Ogilby. The history of that great and renowned monarchy of China wherein all the particular provinces are accurately described, as also the dispositions, manners, learning, lawes, militia, government, and religion of the people : together with the traffick and commodities of that countrey / lately written in Italian by F. Alvarez Semedo ... ; now put into English by a person of quality, and illustrated with several mapps and figures ... ; to which is added the history of the late invasion and conquest of that flourishing kingdom by the Tartars ; with an exact account of the other affairs of China till these present times., and The history of the conquest of China by the Tartars together with an account of several remarkable things concerning the religion, manners, and customes of both nations, but especially the latter / first writ in Spanish by Senõr Palafox ... and now rendred English..

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:

empire, court, prince, city, china, province, tartars, sea, river, chineses, people, king, emperour, water, vice, south, religion, men, majesty, father, country, cities, christian, world, west, town, presents, place, palace, order, officers, mandarins, lord, law, language, journey, house, governor, government, emperor, east, church, army, village, vessels, trade, tartarian, state, souldiers, royal

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 great, and The history of the imperiall estate of the grand seigneurs their habitations, liues, titles ... gouernment and tyranny. Translated out of French by E.G. S.A. 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?":

time, chineses, day, people, manner, others, part, place, side, men, years, things, order, way, number, reason, nothing, days, thing, rest, empire, person, man, name, places, year, use, one, times, call''d, self, parts, end, death, fathers, thence, care, provinces, hath, kings, persons, country, life, body, ships, occasion, sort, sorts, letter, vessels

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, are, was, be, had, were, have, being, made, make, been, do, did, came, having, come, sent, take, go, put, according, give, brought, say, said, has, found, set, went, see, taken, done, call, took, gave, know, concerning, built, given, send, seen, hath, called, lies, makes, lay, let, thought, carry, speak

Proper Nouns

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

city, china, emperor, province, tartars, king, court, father, river, ambassador, 〉, ◊, 〈, mountain, prince, sea, general, vice, call''d, water, east, emperour, chinese, south, kingdom, god, county, men, peking, north, mandarins, west, palace, empire, hollanders, europe, roy, admiral, ●, lord, cities, world, house, presents, hath, countrey, army, christians, christian, governor

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?"

they, their, it, he, his, them, him, we, i, our, you, us, themselves, himself, my, its, your, her, me, she, ''em, one, ours, theirs, thy, us''d, yours, em, thee, itself, vp, vnto, whereof, judg''d, ye, severall, mine, herself, dy''d, †, ya, ourselves, ●, yvenus, sign''d, s, punish''d, pe, o, myself

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?"

great, other, many, same, several, first, such, little, good, whole, more, much, small, own, last, new, second, most, long, certain, high, large, particular, next, full, third, able, least, greatest, true, chinese, best, few, better, like, greater, old, young, present, famous, rich, considerable, ready, extraordinary, strong, short, ancient, vast, fourth, common

not, so, very, also, then, most, only, more, as, up, well, there, much, now, out, never, therefore, again, thus, likewise, yet, together, first, here, far, about, down, before, sometimes, ever, thereof, away, in, especially, soon, long, always, onely, off, often, presently, over, even, rather, no, all, almost, still, afterwards, formerly

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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