Distant Reader - subject-congregationalChurches-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 1,403,195 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 63,781 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 90. 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:

church, god, christ, one, may, power, churches, visible, yet, covenant, members, will, must, men, onely, people, word, say, mr, man, congregation, shall, many, faith, first, lord, doth, also, us, without, apostles, therefore, true, though, way, act, elders, things, now, saith, bee, whole, office, new, every, another, doe, officers, pastors, brethren

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The due right of presbyteries, or, A peaceable plea for the government of the Church of Scotland ... by Samuel Rutherfurd ..., A survey of the Survey of that summe of church-discipline penned by Mr. Thomas Hooker ... wherein the way of the churches of N. England is now re-examined ... / by Samuel Rutherfurd ..., and The true nature of a Gospel church and its government ... by the late pious and learned minister of the Gospel, John Owen ....

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

visible church, holy ghost, lords supper, new testament, jesus christ, catholick church, whole church, single congregation, every one, particular church, true church, one church, one another, one congregation, lord jesus, one place, reverend author, visible churches, particular churches, gods word, particular congregation, new england, church may, reformed churches, one single, may bee, another congregation, first subject, holy spirit, visible saints, saith mr, old testament, catholick visible, full communion, invisible church, divine institution, christ jesus, english books, early english, one body, whole body, many churches, must bee, church covenant, christian church, set members, every church, true visible, man may, brethren say

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The Presbyterian and independent visible churches in New-England and else-where brought to the test, and examined according to the doctrin of Holy Scriptures ... : more particulary directed to those in New-England, and more generally to those in old England, Scotland, Ireland, &c. : with a call and warning from the Lord to the people of Boston and New-England, to repent, &c. : and two letters to the preachers in Boston, and an answer to the gross abuses, lies and slanders of Increase Mather and Nath. Morton, &c. / by George Keith. A defence of the answer made unto the nine questions or positions sent from New-England, against the reply thereto by that reverend servant of Christ, Mr. John Ball, entituled, A tryall of the new church-way in New-England and in old wherin, beside a more full opening of sundry particulars concerning liturgies, power of the keys, matter of the visible church, &c., is more largely handled that controversie concerning the catholick, visible church : tending to cleare up the old-way of Christ in New-England churches / by Iohn Allin [and] Tho. Shepard ..., and A declaration of the faith and order owned and practised in the Congregational Churches in England; agreed upon and consented unto by their elders and messengers in their meeting at the Savoy, Octob. 12. 1658..

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:

church, god, churches, lord, christ, word, scripture, covenant, congregation, gospel, england, elders, cor, spirit, officers, new, apostles, testament, tcp, synod, saints, sacraments, faith, christian, baptisme, acts, act, tim, seales, rom, presbytery, pastors, pastor, ordinances, minister, members, magistrate, law, catholick, brethren, argument, world, roman, prophets, peter, people, paul, ministers, matth, mat

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 church, and The saints anchor-hold, in all storms and tempests preached in sundry sermons, and published for the support and comfort of Gods people, in all times of tryal / by John Davenport ... 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?":

power, church, members, people, men, man, churches, way, things, faith, p., congregation, body, place, scripture, word, part, doth, others, hath, persons, time, officers, reason, thing, covenant, office, children, truth, nature, communion, member, grace, order, apostles, acts, case, pastors, nothing, none, answ, question, brethren, elders, words, matter, believers, day, end, argument

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, were, say, do, had, did, being, make, made, given, called, said, according, give, see, been, bee, come, set, hath, take, baptized, prove, received, put, know, let, done, deny, sent, teach, receive, taken, admitted, preach, having, doe, hold, cast, answer, concerning, doth, required, follow, call, judge

Proper Nouns

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

church, god, christ, 〉, ◊, 〈, c., churches, lord, covenant, mr., ●, h., hath, cor, word, apostles, act, elders, wee, synod, congregation, pastor, doe, lords, gods, new, england, gospel, paul, spirit, law, pag, brethren, holy, office, de, pastors, yea, ans, minister, faith, q., tim, ergo, catholick, christs, king, jesus, mat

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, they, their, them, his, he, we, our, i, you, him, us, themselves, your, its, my, himself, me, her, thy, she, one, thee, theirs, ours, yours, ye, whereof, mine, s, yee, ●, hic, elias, vvhat, understād, u, o, herself, hers, hee, em, ay, vvith, untoit, tamen, suppone, pe, opposito, ob

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?"

such, visible, other, same, many, true, whole, first, particular, own, good, more, great, new, ordinary, common, much, holy, saith, necessary, single, false, private, godly, former, second, right, present, full, free, divine, proper, lawfull, contrary, extraordinary, invisible, most, like, least, due, little, doth, able, spiritual, outward, sufficient, last, old, non, christian

not, so, then, onely, also, therefore, now, yet, here, more, as, only, never, well, up, out, first, together, thus, most, thereof, even, ever, all, there, much, very, off, in, before, away, hence, forth, that, indeed, at, secondly, is, far, else, especially, rather, otherwise, therein, no, alone, still, immediately, too, over

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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