Distant Reader - subject-debt-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 27 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 127,879 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 4,736 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 86. 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:

will, god, psal, text, doe, shall, may, now, good, yet, one, great, time, man, pro, lord, haue, art, men, much, many, debt, vpon, tcp, like, make, prison, english, poore, early, ecclus, must, let, gods, job, doth, take, hee, place, pay, law, mat, though, made, without, parliament, day, first, selfe, well

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The distressed merchant. And the prisoners comfort in distresse. When he was a prisoner in London, in chap. 49. the reader may take notice of, I. His observations of many passages in prison, during his being there. II. The severall humours and carriages of his fellow prisoners. III. His advice to them, and to some of his and their kin, and unkind friends. IV. Gods singular care and providence over all distressed prisoners, that put their trust in him in all afflictions. / Written by William Bagwell merchant., A very soueraigne oyle to restore debtors; being rightly and seasonably vsed Extracted out of that most tried and quintessensed oyle, by the prophet Elisha. By vertue whereof the vviddovv indebted, (mentioned in the second booke of the Kings) was restored out of debt, and her children released of the bondage whereof they were in danger. Written by Samuel Cotesford, late minister at Stepney: and now newly published by W. Crashavve ..., and The scourge of basenesse, or, The old lerry with a new kicksey, and a new cum twang with the old winsye wherein Iohn Taylor hath curried or clapperclawed, neere a thousand of his bad debters, who will not pay him vpon his returnes from Scotland, Germany, Bohemia, the voyages of the paper boate, and his nauigations to Yorke and Salsbury with Oates..

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

early english, english books, books online, text creation, creation partnership, early works, page images, textual changes, humble petition, without asking, encoded edition, iv tiff, asking permission, tiff page, markup reviewed, encoded text, text transcribed, creative commons, batch review, work described, institutions providing, commercial purposes, image set, xml conversion, providing financial, images scanned, pfs batch, online text, bit group, tcp assigned, proquest page, financial support, god will, euery one, must needs, let vs, common law, page image, short title, proofread approx, letters patents, linguistically annotated, fully proofread, digital transcription, tcp digital, based collaborative, notre dame, earlyprint project, annotation includes, collaborative curation

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The case between the Right Honourable City of London, and Robert Campion Represented to publick view, after sixteen years private sad sufferings, and attendance, early and late, upon the several Lord Mayors, aldermen, and common-councels, without relief. Whereas it appears by experience that many inconveniences have arisen both to tutors and pupils for want of due payment of quarterly bills and by reason of pupils trading with unlicensed persons, and without order of their tutors; for the remedying these inconveniences, it is hereby thought fit by us whose names are hereunto subscribed, tutors in the University, to offer unto the consideration of Mr Vicechancellor and heads of colleges our humble request as followeth, ..., and To the Kings Most Excellent Majestie the humble address of poor distressed prisoners for debt..

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:

tcp, lord, law, god, thomas, text, prisoner, parliament, man, world, widdow, vassall, thou, thes, taylor, sam, robert, record, psal, protector, prophet, pro, plaintiff, pettus, oyle, nicholas, mat, majesties, king, john, joh, james, iesus, honourable, highness, haue, great, gospel, good, exchequer, estate, esa, england, early, earl, doth, debt, creditors, creditor, court

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 thou, and To the right honorable the Lords spirituall and temporall in this present Parliament assembled the humble petition of Erasmus Record and Millicent Vaughan widow, the administratrix of the goods, chattels and debts of Walter Vaughan deceased. 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?":

text, time, man, men, debt, art, prison, place, day, thy, selfe, life, t, way, creditors, friends, b, things, poore, people, l, thee, c, words, books, care, doth, works, money, images, heart, end, xml, h, debts, ▪, hand, thing, image, page, g, hee, case, againe, texts, meanes, work, p, hath, power

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, is, are, was, have, said, had, were, did, being, make, let, take, pay, been, made, ''s, doe, according, say, know, haue, encoded, come, thou, see, live, give, put, do, brought, set, am, has, done, get, paid, pray, bring, based, taken, dost, having, thinke, aim, vnto, lost, called, keepe, -

Proper Nouns

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

thou, god, psal, doe, lord, c, g, d, f, e, b, tcp, ecclus, job, mat, m, k, gods, h, pro, q, parliament, law, hath, england, cor, christ, l, t, hast, text, haue, thy, english, le, john, act, thee, london, king, prisoner, r, goe, u, esay, prophet, art, thomason, hee, chap

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?"

i, his, their, they, it, he, him, thy, them, you, my, your, me, her, our, thee, we, she, us, themselves, himself, vp, mine, its, u, theirs, s, thou, f, ''s, one, l, yours, ours, did''st, yoak''d, ye, trahit, severall, lov''st, k, ian, elias, eb''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?"

such, good, great, other, many, much, early, more, same, english, first, true, due, rich, full, common, little, able, late, free, textual, saith, last, humble, honest, available, small, present, best, old, better, long, holy, wise, wicked, most, honourable, greater, own, haue, further, ready, second, high, worse, sure, keyboarded, financial, commercial, new

not, then, so, now, here, more, yet, therefore, out, also, thus, well, much, up, as, very, pro, most, away, all, thereof, still, rather, ever, in, online, never, there, too, only, long, early, at, above, onely, first, likewise, thereby, even, together, vs, perhaps, vpon, otherwise, before, just, once, often, no, fully

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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