Distant Reader - subject-englishPoetry-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 55 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,345,714 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 24,467 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 97. 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:

xml, id, facs, reg, lemma, pos, pc, will, love, like, may, shall, now, yet, one, doth, acp, make, see, whose, great, loue, let, still, must, made, men, man, first, good, well, eyes, time, heart, much, though, life, death, day, king, come, long, us, fair, know, new, old, world, god, might

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The maid''s tragedy altered with some other pieces / by Edmund Waller, Esq. ; not before printed in the several editions of his poems., Englands Parnassus: or the choysest flowers of our moderne poets, with their poeticall comparisons Descriptions of bewties, personages, castles, pallaces, mountaines, groues, seas, springs, riuers, &c. Whereunto are annexed other various discourses, both pleasaunt and profitable., and Theatrum poetarum, or, A compleat collection of the poets especially the most eminent, of all ages, the antients distinguish''t from the moderns in their several alphabets : with some observations and reflections upon many of them, particularly those of our own nation : together with a prefatory discourse of the poets and poetry in generall / by Edward Phillips..

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

pos acp, pc xml, cs reg, vvi reg, pos vvi, pos av, sentence xml, unit sentence, pc unit, po reg, pos po, cc reg, pos vvb, vvb reg, pos cc, av reg, vvn reg, pos vvn, pns reg, pos pns, vvz reg, pos vvz, pos cs, pos vvd, vvd reg, pos pn, pn reg, pos crq, early english, english books, rendition hi, nn reg, pos vmb, vmb reg, books online, pno reg, pos pno, type contract, ab reg, page images, text creation, creation partnership, pos vmd, vmd reg, pos xx, xx reg, eos facs, pb facs, facs tcp, pos vvg

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The maid''s tragedy altered with some other pieces / by Edmund Waller, Esq. ; not before printed in the several editions of his poems. Doctor Cooper at work upon Dauncey''s bones: and Cook licking his fingers after his dose and pill., and Verses, lately vvritten by Thomas Earle of Straford [sic]..

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, love, like, thy, man, king, god, eyes, sun, soul, heart, world, english, wit, song, life, lady, death, thee, nature, men, fate, thou, gods, eye, beauty, sea, poets, lovers, loue, earth, doth, verse, sir, muse, lord, great, friend, face, early, charms, youth, venus, text, state, queene, poet, passion, mr., maid

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 a67336, and The golden garland of princely pleasures and delicate delights Wherin is conteined the histories of many of the kings, queenes, princes, lords, ladies, knights, and gentlewomen of this kingdome. Being most pleasant songs and sonnets to sundry new tunes now most in vse: the third time imprinted, enlarged and corrected by Rich. Iohnson. Deuided into two parts. 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?":

xml, t, pc, l, p, eyes, men, love, pos="n1, heart, time, man, doth, death, life, day, things, name, self, none, face, mind, way, pos="n2, art, thy, ▪, place, nothing, night, part, fire, hand, cs, world, thing, light, text, rest, thoughts, friend, others, sight, nature, head, pos="vvi, faire, words, power, p.

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, was, are, did, have, do, were, had, see, make, let, ''s, made, come, been, know, does, take, has, being, say, said, find, give, am, makes, tell, think, go, love, found, set, came, bring, thought, done, sing, lost, die, live, wrote, keep, fall, lay, neuer, left, grow, gone, call

Proper Nouns

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

id="a67336, facs="a67336, w, thou, pos="acp, 〉, love, ◊, loue, 〈, ●, god, pos="j, lemma="the, reg="the, poet, king, sir, t, xml, unit="sentence, song, c., tcp, verse, pos="vvb, pos="po, pos="cc, i., hath, thy, pos="d, pos="vvn, mr., lemma="be, lemma="and, sun, pc, fate, english, reg="to, pos="vvz, lady, lord, wit, world, m., beauty, doth, idem

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, my, her, he, you, their, it, they, your, me, she, our, we, thy, him, them, thee, us, its, himself, ''em, themselves, mine, ''s, yours, one, ours, l, theirs, ye, vp, em, hers, us''d, vvith, shou''d, nay, dy''d, s, ne, vvhat, ts, herself, ay, fau, bloodie, whereof, vnto, thou

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, more, great, good, other, same, own, true, many, old, first, pos="n1, sweet, fair, new, much, little, last, full, best, vain, high, happy, poor, bright, most, sad, soft, wise, long, young, several, doth, free, dead, gentle, noble, sacred, english, early, least, greater, sure, rich, false, better, ill, mighty, small, dear

not, so, then, now, too, more, still, thus, here, as, yet, well, most, there, never, out, up, away, once, ever, only, first, long, much, no, down, also, alone, again, all, far, very, forth, therefore, onely, else, in, oft, even, before, soon, just, sometimes, on, rather, together, often, above, off, n''t

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.