Distant Reader - subject-gloucesterEngland-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 5 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 20,353 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 4,070 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 88. 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:

us, enemy, day, one, great, city, night, text, two, horse, shot, army, wee, regiments, lord, marched, august, men, many, enemies, came, made, towne, little, three, miles, hill, early, gate, london, regiment, souldiers, generall, time, glocester, within, killed, citie, whole, also, english, called, tcp, body, morning, mile, without, east, yet, forth

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are A Briefe and exact relation of the most materiall and remarkeable passages that hapned in the late well-formed (and as valiently defended) seige laid before the city of Glocester collected by John Dorney, Esquire, towne-clarke of the said city, who was there resident the whole siege and appled himselfe wholy to this businesse., A true and exact relation of the marchings of the two regiments of the trained-bands of the city of London being the red & blevv regiments, as also of the three regiments of the auxiliary forces the blew, red, and orange who marched forth for the reliefe of the city of Glocester from August by Henry Foster ..., and [To the kings most excellent majesty. The humble address of your most loyal ... subjects ... of] Hereford.

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

lord generall, early english, english books, books online, two regiments, whole army, village called, fryars orchard, red regiment, trained bands, marched away, early works, next morning, page images, textual changes, sabbath day, sallied forth, exact relation, creation partnership, auxiliary forces, enemies horse, retreated without, text creation, wee advanced, great body, within lesse, gawdy green, enemy shot, east gate, thomas pury, forlorn hope, north gate, whereof one, wee marched, three miles, kings army, asking permission, institutions providing, late well, pfs batch, dennis wise, three regiments, musket shot, tcp assigned, text transcribed, john dorney, encoded text, rignall stile, creative commons, providing financial

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are [To the kings most excellent majesty. The humble address of your most loyal ... subjects ... of] Hereford The 21. of August. 1643. Whereas the Committee for the Militia in the city of London by vertue of an ordinance of both houses of Parliament ... have power to command the shutting up of all shops ..., and A true and exact relation of the marchings of the two regiments of the trained-bands of the city of London being the red & blevv regiments, as also of the three regiments of the auxiliary forces the blew, red, and orange who marched forth for the reliefe of the city of Glocester from August by Henry Foster ....

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:

city, towne, tcp, regiments, majesty, lord, generall, east, committee, citie, canon, august, army

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 enemy, and At a Common Councell there held the two and twentieth day of August, 1656 in the time of Dennis Wise, Esq; mayor there. 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?":

enemy, day, night, text, horse, men, enemies, miles, time, shot, morning, hill, body, mile, gate, regiments, village, souldiers, others, place, works, side, houses, end, wall, field, water, divers, reliefe, house, forces, party, halfe, foot, fire, city, books, top, siege, man, images, xml, workes, trenches, town, rest, quarter, prisoners, regiment, page

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:

was, were, had, be, is, being, have, marched, did, came, made, said, killed, are, shot, called, having, been, taken, stood, fell, advanced, quartered, brought, fired, come, sent, took, making, give, gave, retreated, received, began, trained, make, encoded, according, performed, lay, send, sallied, lost, has, forced, faced, done, commanded, planted, coming

Proper Nouns

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

city, wee, lord, army, august, towne, london, regiments, glocester, generall, tcp, citie, god, east, ordnance, canon, regiment, majesty, gloucester, england, captain, pury, parliament, horse, captaine, orchard, north, bands, thomas, text, king, fryars, english, bristoll, town, lieutenant, lanthony, september, sept., john, gawdy, foote, doe, committee, colonell, wing, transcribed, thomason, south, souldiers

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, we, their, they, us, them, it, your, his, i, you, he, themselves, him, my, theirs, ours, me, thy, one, its, himself, thee, mine, her

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?"

great, many, little, other, whole, such, same, early, good, most, next, english, red, true, late, right, more, dead, textual, small, own, first, exact, humble, few, very, open, available, much, full, auxiliary, twentieth, severall, ready, proofread, particular, loyal, keyboarded, hot, forlorn, financial, commercial, better, adjacent, able, younger, worthy, wet, valiant, tractable

not, up, there, about, then, so, most, very, also, out, forth, away, now, as, well, likewise, much, more, off, here, in, early, thereof, all, online, even, before, yet, presently, only, accordingly, together, never, home, hence, above, thereupon, therefore, hard, afterwards, thereby, onely, on, further, fully, far, ever, by, valiently, too

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.