Distant Reader - subject-fastsAndFeasts-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 54 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 150,283 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 2,783 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 83. 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, text, will, may, day, tcp, us, lord, great, early, english, shall, people, eebo, england, books, works, time, men, first, hee, good, yet, church, vs, one, many, online, christ, fast, humiliation, now, encoded, parliament, therefore, tei, wee, work, made, xml, phase, make, must, texts, image, man, bee, scotland, images, let

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Scotlands warning, or a treatise of fasting containing a declaration of the causes of the solemne fast, indyted to bee kept in all the Churches of Scotland, the third and fourth sundayes of this instant moneth of May Anno 1628.& the weeke dayes betwixt them, as they may be goodly keeped in Townes. Together with a direction how to proceed in the religious obseruation of any soleme fast. Written at the appointment of superiors by Mr. W. Struther, preacher of the Gospel at Edinburgh., An admonition concerning a publick fast the just causes we have for it, from the full growth of sin, and the near approaches of God''s judgments : and the manner of performance to obtain the desired effects thereof, which ought to be other than our Common Forms, and with stricter acts of moritication than is usual amongst us : with an abstract of Mr. Chillingworth''s judgement of the state of religion in this nation in his time : and of a letter from the Hague concerning two sermons preached there in the French church at which were present divers of the English nobility., and The meanes and method of healing in the Church. Set forth in a sermon. Preached before the Right Honourable the House of Peers in Westminster Abby, April 30. 1660. being a day of solemn humiliation to seek God for his blessing on the counsels of the Parliament. By Edward Reynolds, D.D. and Dean of Christ-Church..

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

english books, early english, books online, early works, creation partnership, text creation, page images, privy council, textual changes, mona logarbo, pfs batch, financial support, proquest page, markup reviewed, xml conversion, text transcribed, bit group, creative commons, encoded edition, work described, without asking, asking permission, image set, institutions providing, tiff page, providing financial, encoded text, tcp assigned, images scanned, iv tiff, online text, commercial purposes, batch review, great britain, represented either, image sets, tcp schema, characters represented, page image, gap elements, lord protector, eng fasts, title catalog, end users, let us, notre dame, computationally tractable, standard spellings, short title, linguistically annotated

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are A proclamation, superceding the monthly fast after September, 1693. A proclamation, indicting a solemn and religious fast, to be keeped and observed throughout the whole kingdom of Scotland., and Proclamation for a solemn national monthly fast.

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, early, parliament, god, scotland, england, land, commons, church, christ, world, wednesday, wales, saviour, london, day, council, christian, assembly, wee, text, soule, son, sinne, service, saint, repentance, religion, reformation, psalm, prince, poor, people, paul, parents, nation, men, man, lords, light, lent, king, judgments, judgements, jer, iustices, isa, holy, highness

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 2[o] Decembris. 1646. An ordinance of the Lords and Commons assembled in Parliament for the better observation of the monethly fast 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, day, people, works, time, men, xml, books, texts, image, work, images, page, characters, man, things, end, keying, eebo, edition, heart, elements, hath, changes, feasts, hee, life, sins, purposes, users, markup, transcription, humiliation, way, title, sin, doth, others, project, encoding, data, blood, selves, name, sinne, reason, author, t, conversion, wrath

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, have, were, been, do, did, encoded, made, make, had, let, take, see, said, come, given, based, set, has, according, being, -, give, observed, kept, published, done, say, performed, bee, appointed, aim, put, read, hath, sent, called, providing, owned, scanned, reviewed, modified, edited, distributed, described, copied, coded

Proper Nouns

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

god, tcp, lord, 〉, england, ◊, 〈, text, christ, english, church, scotland, wee, hath, parliament, thomason, london, lords, tei, eebo, wales, king, oxford, commons, transcribed, humiliation, creation, proquest, phase, partnership, council, thou, hee, land, gospel, c., edinburgh, online, great, bee, st., kingdom, printed, books, privy, haue, holy, grace, day, iv

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?"

our, his, their, it, we, they, them, he, i, us, him, you, your, my, thy, her, me, themselves, himself, thee, its, she, vp, ours, ye, theirs, one, mine, l, ''s, yours, yee, y, whereof, us''d, thou, t''himself, hee, ''em

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, great, other, early, many, good, own, english, first, same, available, more, true, textual, present, whole, greater, general, last, several, due, solemn, keyboarded, financial, commercial, little, much, second, proofread, most, illegible, better, poor, new, high, suitable, common, holy, long, like, original, particular, old, light, usual, standard, public, markup, tractable, standardized

not, so, then, more, now, therefore, out, most, early, as, online, even, very, up, well, yet, thereof, also, much, only, thus, never, ever, above, first, in, too, there, here, away, onely, over, still, vs, just, down, together, fast, apart, again, next, indeed, forth, fully, off, especially, sometimes, long, rather, 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.

Thank you for using the Distant Reader.