Distant Reader - subject-devotion-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 80 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 3,508,458 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 43,855 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 95. 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, lord, us, may, will, shall, love, man, good, christ, let, things, one, life, yet, make, holy, must, great, soul, self, world, much, therefore, heart, now, grace, men, spirit, give, many, first, day, without, ever, sin, made, time, heaven, come, also, glory, see, mercy, every, art, death, father, even, though

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are A help for the understanding of the Holy Scripture intended chiefly for the assistance and information of those that use constantly every day to reade some part of the Bible, and would gladly alwayes understand what they read if they had some man to help them : the first part : containing certain short notes of exposition upon the five books of Moses, to wit Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomie : wherein all such passages in the text are explained as were thought likely to be questioned by any reader of ordinary capacity ... / by Arthur Jackson ..., A spiritual treasure containing our obligations to God, and the vertues necessary to a perfect Christian. Written in French by John Quarre, Englished by Sir Thomas Stanley, Kt., and The confession and conversion of the chiefest and greatest of sinners, with his frequent communion with God, in Christ, by the spirit, or, A garden of spiritual fruits and flowers.

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

jesus christ, iesus christ, let us, lord god, holy spirit, holy ghost, every one, give us, english books, early english, god will, make us, right hand, one another, must needs, books online, lord jesus, every man, every day, ye shall, every thing, mine eyes, may see, ah lord, will make, page images, good lord, without end, shall come, will give, text creation, creation partnership, may never, will never, good things, humbly beseech, shall see, world without, take heed, shall never, many times, love god, holy name, give thanks, almighty god, whole world, good works, may say, make use, heavenly father

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are To all the faithfull and suffering members in all holes, prisons, and goals for the Word of God and testimony of Jesus Christ, with the rest of the faithful where-ever scatter''d upon the face of the earth The Christians pattern, or A divine treatise of the imitation of Christ. Written originally in Latin, by Thomas of Kempis, above 200. years since. Faithfully Englished. And printed in a large character for the benefit of the aged, and The safe vvay to glory, in several exercises of general use. / By William Smyth M. Ar. R. of Cotton in Suff..

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:

god, lord, spirit, christ, thy, father, tcp, church, soul, saviour, world, thou, thee, man, prayer, son, jesus, holy, psal, gods, faith, angels, earth, christian, love, heart, glory, saints, life, king, iesus, apostle, good, body, religion, nature, mee, law, grace, cor, prophet, prayers, heaven, hath, bee, word, sun, soule, scripture, power

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 thy, and A spiritual spicerie containing sundrie sweet tractates of devotion and piety. By Ri. Brathwait, Esq. 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?":

things, man, life, self, thy, heart, love, day, men, soul, time, thee, grace, sin, world, death, nothing, glory, mercy, vers, thing, way, sins, body, selves, art, people, power, others, hath, end, name, nature, light, reason, hand, part, place, prayer, words, earth, spirit, faith, eyes, peace, truth, word, t, mind, work

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, do, let, make, had, being, give, made, come, see, am, did, been, take, know, say, said, done, according, live, love, set, put, think, hath, blessed, given, keep, go, called, thou, find, bring, having, look, suffer, hear, receive, consider, call, pray, taken, grant, brought, makes

Proper Nouns

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

god, thou, lord, christ, 〉, ◊, 〈, heaven, c., hath, hast, father, spirit, holy, jesus, thee, world, gods, church, ●, son, saviour, love, man, iesus, prayer, moses, grace, soul, yea, earth, christian, angels, ye, law, mee, thine, cor, faith, life, art, tcp, king, thy, chap, psal, israel, divine, nature, doe

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, i, his, my, he, our, thy, we, me, they, them, their, him, us, thee, you, your, her, himself, themselves, its, she, mine, ours, one, theirs, ye, itself, ''em, yours, thou, ''s, vnto, vp, whereof, †, s, l, em, ay, ●, whosoever, elias, ourselves, u, o, hee, vvhat, us''d, trye

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?"

good, great, other, own, such, many, more, holy, same, true, much, first, little, whole, full, best, most, better, last, glorious, necessary, perfect, able, present, poor, greater, least, eternal, high, sure, gracious, heavenly, sweet, greatest, spiritual, free, new, right, very, divine, old, wicked, happy, wise, pure, common, particular, infinite, second, merciful

not, so, then, more, therefore, now, up, most, ever, also, even, here, never, as, only, yet, onely, out, much, thus, well, that, is, away, too, first, very, there, down, rather, again, forth, still, long, indeed, far, off, together, often, in, all, thereof, no, else, truly, just, especially, always, once, whatsoever

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.

Thank you for using the Distant Reader.