Distant Reader - subject-dissentersReligious-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 231 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 5,711,887 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 24,726 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 89. 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, will, may, us, one, men, shall, yet, christ, must, things, man, say, now, many, much, make, good, great, people, therefore, first, without, power, made, true, churches, religion, law, thing, though, king, way, lord, well, time, let, world, take, worship, every, others, england, mr, never, whether, word, know, also

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The unreasonableness of separation, or, An impartial account of the history, nature, and pleas of the present separation from the communion of the Church of England to which, several late letters are annexed, of eminent Protestant divines abroad, concerning the nature of our differences, and the way to compose them / by Edward Stillingfleet ..., Theodulia, or, A just defence of hearing the sermons and other teaching of the present ministers of England against a book unjustly entituled (in Greek) A Christian testimony against them that serve the image of the beast, (in English) A Christian and sober testimony against sinful complyance, wherein the unlawfulness of hearing the present ministers of England is pretended to be clearly demonstrated by an author termed by himself Christophilus Antichristomachus / by John Tombes., and An Exact collection of farewel sermons preached by the late London-ministers viz. Mr. Calamy, Mr. Watson, Mr. Jacomb, Mr. Case, Mr. Sclater, Mr. Baxter, Mr. Jenkin, Dr. Manton, Mr. Lye, Mr. Collins : to which is added their prayers before and after sermon as also Mr. Calamy''s sermon for which he was imprisoned in Newgate : his sermon at Mr. Ashe''s funeral and Dr. Horton''s and Mr. Nalton''s funeral..

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

english books, early english, let us, books online, jesus christ, one another, text creation, creation partnership, page images, every one, tell us, master cotton, christ jesus, holy ghost, every man, must needs, tells us, will never, much less, among us, god will, true church, tcp schema, image sets, represented either, characters represented, present ministers, lord jesus, mr cotton, will make, roman non, one thing, particular church, take heed, reformed churches, national church, will say, every thing, christian religion, amongst us, many things, new testament, good men, worship god, may see, man may, publick worship, protestant religion, take away, gods word

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are A discourse concerning liberty of conscience In which are contain''d proposalls, about what liberty in this kind is now politically expedient to be given, and severall reasons to shew how much the peace and welfare of the nation is concern''d therein. By R.T. An ansvver to the author of Humble thanks for His Majesties gracious declaration for liberty of conscience., and An ingenious contention, by way of letter, between Mr. Wanly, a son of the Church; & Dr. Wild, a nonconformist..

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, tcp, god, religion, king, lord, government, law, england, people, christ, churches, laws, power, spirit, conscience, christian, communion, scripture, ministers, man, authority, world, gospel, nation, bishops, act, covenant, men, dissenters, book, parliament, early, non, liberty, majesty, doctrine, ceremonies, roman, kingdom, word, papists, mr., magistrate, bishop, worship, party, apostle, state, peace

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 Richard Baxters answer to Dr. Edward Stillingfleet''s charge of separation containing, I. some queries necessary for the understanding of his accusation, II. a reply to his letter which denyeth a solution, III. an answer to his printed sermon : humbly tendred, I. to himself, II. to the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor and the court of aldermen, III. to the readers of his accusation, the forum where we are accused. 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, things, man, people, thing, p., way, time, others, power, part, words, reason, self, religion, nothing, truth, sin, t, church, hath, word, none, day, churches, world, place, work, peace, case, worship, order, matter, scripture, selves, use, cause, text, persons, doth, separation, end, name, life, person, times, one, nature, faith, ▪

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, had, say, been, make, did, being, made, let, take, know, think, said, see, give, come, has, done, according, am, given, put, set, ''s, called, believe, prove, hath, taken, find, tell, having, go, use, speak, thought, found, read, hear, call, used, answer, does, live

Proper Nouns

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

god, church, christ, 〉, ◊, 〈, c., lord, law, england, king, mr., hath, churches, government, communion, bishop, christians, christian, ministers, conscience, spirit, world, tcp, bishops, gospel, thou, authority, men, ●, laws, doctrine, power, act, religion, gods, holy, faith, man, parliament, liberty, book, english, dr., worship, l., covenant, word, m., text

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, i, their, his, he, them, you, we, our, us, him, your, my, me, themselves, himself, its, her, thy, she, thee, theirs, one, ours, yours, ye, mine, ''em, ''s, itself, l, us''d, †, whereof, em, ib, s, hers, whosoever, ourselves, shou''d, ‖, vvhat, u, ay, ian, herself, vp, vnto

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, other, many, own, great, same, good, true, more, first, much, little, present, necessary, whole, particular, common, least, false, greater, most, better, lawful, several, new, holy, best, old, general, very, few, last, second, former, publick, contrary, saith, certain, able, private, civil, late, greatest, sufficient, early, due, unlawful, full, free, less

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

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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