Distant Reader - subject-englishLanguage-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 24 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,294,771 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 53,948 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 92. 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:

lat, one, also, called, word, may, see, will, first, man, like, made, great, name, two, thing, make, de, words, good, king, much, time, greek, part, men, place, shall, many, law, french, another, used, old, now, english, common, belonging, yet, little, things, well, god, certain, long, say, without, every, kind, taken

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The new world of English words, or, A general dictionary containing the interpretations of such hard words as are derived from other languages ... together with all those terms that relate to the arts and sciences ... : to which are added the significations of proper names, mythology, and poetical fictions, historical relations, geographical descriptions of most countries and cities of the world ... / collected and published by E.P., Glossographia, or, A dictionary interpreting all such hard words of whatsoever language now used in our refined English tongue with etymologies, definitions and historical observations on the same : also the terms of divinity, law, physick, mathematicks and other arts and sciences explicated / by T.B., and Remaines of a greater worke, concerning Britaine, the inhabitants thereof, their languages, names, surnames, empreses, wise speeches, poësies, and epitaphes.

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

old word, common law, proper name, otherwise called, now called, english books, early english, also called, king henry, scriptural examples, word used, english examples, french word, give example, every one, preterperfect tense, books online, de la, latin word, one thing, called also, greek word, saxon word, king edward, present tense, dutch word, commonly called, also used, page images, precious stone, brought forth, let us, creation partnership, text creation, anciently called, proper names, every man, commonly taken, take away, vulgarly called, will make, will never, one another, term used, english tongue, much used, may see, one word, taking away, one syllable

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The canting academy, or, The devils cabinet opened wherein is shewn the mysterious and villanous practices of that wicked crew, commonly known by the names of hectors, trapanners, gilts, &c. : to which is added a compleat canting-dictionary, both of old words, and such as are now most in use : with several new catches and songs, compos''d by the choisest wits of the age ... An Englis[h] expositor[:] teaching the in[ter]pretation of the harde[st] words [vsed] in our language. With sundry [ex]plicat[ions, de]scriptions [, and d]iscourses. By I.B. ..., and The mysterie of rhetorique unveil''d wherein above 130 the tropes and figures are severally derived from the Greek into English : together with lively definitions and variety of Latin, English, scriptural, examples, pertinent to each of them apart. Conducing very much to the right understanding of the sense of the letter of the scripture, (the want whereof occasions many dangerous errors this day). Eminently delightful and profitable for young scholars, and others of all sorts, enabling them to discern and imitate the elegancy in any author they read, &c. / by John Smith..

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:

english, tcp, word, god, man, thing, sea, lord, king, like, good, court, time, sir, saxon, place, north, law, latin, hath, great, french, country, city, church, sun, sound, song, prince, master, love, latine, lat, gentleman, england, book, wife, west, vse, verbs, town, st., sect, romans, poets, order, nature, nation, letter, lady

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 lat, and Lily, improved, corrected, and explained with the etymological part of the common accidence. By W. T. Master of a boarding-school at Fulham, near London, for above two and twenty years. 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?":

word, man, thing, name, words, time, part, place, men, things, kind, c., day, self, body, way, people, one, t, others, parts, nothing, names, son, m., love, life, term, house, hath, head, end, speech, figure, nature, hand, doth, year, water, person, manner, heart, use, money, death, matter, number, sort, order, letters

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, was, called, have, were, see, being, made, had, make, do, used, belonging, did, say, taken, said, put, take, been, give, having, let, come, set, hath, call, am, know, signifying, done, signifies, go, making, brought, according, given, makes, found, pertaining, written, has, says, comes, ''s, came, use, write

Proper Nouns

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

lat, 〉, ◊, 〈, c., a., q., ●, king, greek, de, i., god, law, thou, english, fr, f., french, sir, hath, lord, est, y, latin, el, e., sea, n., que, la, gr, common, town, court, england, r., e, church, city, sun, saxon, s, verb, m., romans, kinde, st., verbs, se

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, he, they, you, their, my, her, him, your, them, we, me, our, she, us, thy, himself, its, themselves, thee, one, ''em, mine, yours, ''s, ay, ours, ye, vp, theirs, us''d, em, ui, u, whereof, s, l, herself, vnto, pelf, non, ne, ti, o, iu, itself, hers, delf

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?"

other, great, first, such, good, same, many, old, little, certain, more, much, common, own, full, long, second, proper, last, short, true, french, most, ancient, small, third, new, whole, famous, like, several, high, best, english, young, fair, sweet, better, chief, white, fourth, former, strong, large, hard, dead, greater, right, perfect, next

not, so, also, then, out, now, more, up, very, most, as, together, well, thus, away, much, first, never, onely, too, in, therefore, commonly, sometimes, there, off, down, here, forth, often, long, yet, that, only, still, again, is, before, otherwise, rather, ever, over, properly, thereof, hence, all, far, even, back, once

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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