Distant Reader - subject-colchesterEngland-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 7 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 80,079 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 11,439 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 88. 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:

god, us, will, shall, one, many, men, now, lord, time, might, great, made, much, enemy, people, generall, yet, also, non, gentlemen, town, roman, day, though, sir, two, county, may, came, house, text, make, every, power, night, party, things, whole, first, army, man, away, horse, must, sent, like, enemies, officers, without

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are A most true and exact relation of that as honourable as unfortunate expedition of Kent, Essex, and Colchester by M.C., a loyall actor in that engagement, Anno Dom. 1648., Eben-ezer a memoriall of the deliverance of Essex, county, and committee, being an exposition on the first ten verses of the third chapter of the prophesie of Habakkuk in two sermons. The first preached at Colchester before his Excellency on a day of thanksgiving for the surrender thereof. The other at Rumford unto the committee who were imprisoned by the enemy Sep. 28. a day set apart unto thanksgiving for their deliverance. / By John Ovven pastor of the church of God which is at Coggeshall., and The demands and proposals of the Earle of Norwich, and Sr. Charles Lucas, (in the name of themselves, and the rest of his Majesties officers and souldiers in the city of Colchester) to Generall Fairfax, concerning the surrendering of the said city, ad their resolution thereupon. With the answer of the Lord Generall to the said demands and proposals also, the proceedings of the Scots-Royalists neare the Parliament doores, and their animating on the people to cudgell the Parliament. Likewise, the d[i]scovery of a great designe in the city of London, to have murthered most of the Parliament men, and the apprehending of the Princes agent at the Royall Exchange, and taking of divers commissions from his Highnes to the citizens, for the raising of a army for his Royal father the King. Signed, Charles. P..

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

roman non, early english, english books, books online, next morning, charles lucas, next day, lord fairfax, sir charls, sir charles, early works, god will, deputy lieutenants, page images, charls lucas, quite naked, textual changes, honorable house, william lenthal, whole body, severall places, lord generall, every man, every one, short time, creation partnership, text creation, might easily, sir william, gods people, marched away, greatest part, set fire, lenthal esq, sir george, grand jury, private souldiers, whole army, one man, batch review, creative commons, let us, commercial purposes, encoded edition, bit group, will never, lord capell, online text, financial support, honorable william

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are A most true and exact relation of that as honourable as unfortunate expedition of Kent, Essex, and Colchester by M.C., a loyall actor in that engagement, Anno Dom. 1648. A true relation of the surrendring of Colchester to his Excellency the Lord Generall Fairfax. As it was sent in a letter to the Honourable William Lenthal, Esquire, speaker of the Honourable House of Commons., and A letter sent to the Honorable William Lenthal Esq; Speaker of the Honorable House of Commons, of the late fight at Colchester, and, how the suburbs of the said town were fired by the Lord Goring, Lord Capel, Sir Charls Lucas, and the rest of the enemy. Printed by the command of the Honorable William Lenthal Esq; Speaker of the Honorable House of Commons..

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:

parliament, lord, town, souldiers, sir, sea, roman, rock, rivers, psal, prophet, princes, petition, party, officers, nations, london, land, kingdome, horse, honourable, honorable, gods, god, gentlemen, generall, foot, exod, engagement, enemy, county, councell, committee, commissioners, city, churches, church, bow, army

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 god, and The demands and proposals of the Earle of Norwich, and Sr. Charles Lucas, (in the name of themselves, and the rest of his Majesties officers and souldiers in the city of Colchester) to Generall Fairfax, concerning the surrendering of the said city, ad their resolution thereupon. With the answer of the Lord Generall to the said demands and proposals also, the proceedings of the Scots-Royalists neare the Parliament doores, and their animating on the people to cudgell the Parliament. Likewise, the d[i]scovery of a great designe in the city of London, to have murthered most of the Parliament men, and the apprehending of the Princes agent at the Royall Exchange, and taking of divers commissions from his Highnes to the citizens, for the raising of a army for his Royal father the King. Signed, Charles. P. 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?":

men, time, people, day, night, power, things, gentlemen, man, text, way, place, enemies, party, thing, rest, part, mercy, others, deliverance, service, nothing, enemy, reason, places, end, work, hath, body, works, officers, mercies, faith, order, morning, designe, horse, businesse, side, selves, field, condition, peace, life, house, hand, fire, country, againe, town

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:

be, was, is, were, have, had, being, are, made, having, been, came, make, did, sent, give, do, said, done, taken, come, according, let, marched, left, take, found, 〈, gave, began, set, know, see, brought, given, thought, called, received, drawn, hath, lay, say, intended, went, proved, comming, resolved, receive, think, appointed

Proper Nouns

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

god, ◊, 〉, 〈, lord, sir, county, enemy, generall, town, army, house, thou, parliament, colchester, hath, petition, london, horse, towne, gods, lucas, kingdome, city, committee, church, sea, foot, lords, country, souldiers, engagement, john, gentlemen, c., tcp, councell, christ, essex, psal, king, fairfax, commons, commissioners, party, officers, march, heaven, castle, thomason

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?"

their, they, it, his, them, he, we, our, i, him, you, us, your, themselves, my, thy, her, its, me, himself, theirs, thee, she, mine, yours, severall, ours, ourselves, one, l, hers, amaz''d

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?"

many, other, great, non, roman, -, such, much, own, whole, more, same, next, first, good, little, mighty, last, full, high, true, strong, old, least, honourable, better, present, greatest, best, ready, private, new, most, former, able, small, particular, honorable, short, like, early, glorious, few, naked, late, very, severall, greater, generall, dead

not, so, then, out, up, now, very, as, also, more, away, most, there, indeed, in, yet, never, here, only, forth, well, too, thus, down, off, ever, together, on, much, before, still, immediately, onely, all, enough, almost, over, afterwards, about, first, again, rather, no, long, even, back, therefore, easily, quite, often

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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