Distant Reader - subject-greece-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 14 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 2,494,933 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 178,209 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:

one, great, made, men, time, first, also, many, much, city, man, people, two, yet, came, called, now, army, athenians, place, might, make, haue, without, romans, king, things, hee, day, sent, sea, others, good, part, put, will, another, like, name, vnto, may, gods, war, shall, rest, well, rome, taken, went, come

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are A complete dictionary of the Greek and Roman antiquities explaining the obscure places in classic authors and ancient historians relating to the religion, mythology, history, geography and chronology of the ancient Greeks and Romans, their ... rites and customs, laws, polity, arts and engines of war : also an account of their navigations, arts and sciences and the inventors of them : with the lives and opinions of their philosophers / compiled originally in French ... by Monsieur Danet ; made English, with the addition of very useful mapps., The history of Polybius the Megalopolitan The fiue first bookes entire: with all the parcels of the subsequent bookes vnto the eighteenth, according to the Greeke originall. Also the manner of the Romane encamping, extracted from the discription of Polybius. Translated into English by Edward Grimeston, sergeant at armes., and Eight bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre written by Thucydides the sonne of Olorus. Interpreted with faith and diligence immediately out of the Greeke by Thomas Hobbes secretary to ye late Earle of Deuonshire.

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

tells us, one another, made use, every one, greatest part, meane time, neere vnto, next day, long time, great many, young men, one day, whole army, three hundred, euery one, right hand, thousand men, haue beene, wee haue, two hundred, julius caesar, young man, one side, good fortune, mean time, great number, many times, right wing, two thousand, like manner, ten thousand, many things, informs us, common people, every year, years old, many others, short time, make use, take care, either side, euery man, tell us, one hand, make warre, another place, roman empire, left wing, took care, great part

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The Greek and Roman history illustrated by coins & medals representing their religions, rites, manners, customs, games, feasts, arts and sciences : together with a succint account of their emperors, consuls, cities, colonies and families, in two parts, necessary for the introduction of youth into all the useful knowledge of antiquity / by O.W. The plague of Athens which hapned in the second year of the Peloponnesian Warr / first described in Greek by Thucydides, then in Latin by Lucretius, now attempted in English by Tho. Sprat., and Archæologiæ græcæ: or, The antiquities of Greece. By John Potter, M.A. and Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxon.

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, sea, king, army, war, son, senate, man, athenians, romans, people, men, enemy, enemies, country, victory, power, life, government, gods, body, place, horse, father, wife, temple, souldiers, soldiers, laws, grecians, friends, empire, countrey, citizens, camp, battel, affairs, women, lacedemonians, general, death, children, caesar, time, state, river, riuer, person, office, law

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 great, and The history of Polybius the Megalopolitan The fiue first bookes entire: with all the parcels of the subsequent bookes vnto the eighteenth, according to the Greeke originall. Also the manner of the Romane encamping, extracted from the discription of Polybius. Translated into English by Edward Grimeston, sergeant at armes. 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?":

time, men, man, people, things, others, day, place, part, rest, way, name, death, manner, hee, thing, reason, end, side, t, enemies, number, order, nothing, years, themselues, body, days, one, power, hands, person, opinion, victory, words, money, c, hand, life, country, use, whence, places, occasion, horse, friends, danger, self, history, parts

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, made, are, have, did, came, called, having, make, sent, been, put, said, taken, went, come, took, brought, gave, thought, says, take, done, say, according, set, do, found, has, see, left, fell, give, haue, let, kept, given, carried, began, hauing, making, built, saw, seeing, lay

Proper Nouns

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

〉, ◊, 〈, city, athenians, army, romans, sea, king, rome, lib, son, c., men, ●, caesar, temple, gods, war, warre, haue, senate, athens, enemy, god, greece, call''d, m., lacedaemonians, jupiter, father, law, l., countrey, carthaginians, pompey, gallies, i., souldiers, a., italy, grecians, alexander, people, apollo, citie, hee, philip, roman, man

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?"

he, his, they, their, it, them, him, her, i, you, we, himself, she, themselves, our, us, your, my, me, its, ''em, thy, one, vp, theirs, thee, us''d, herself, ours, vnto, yours, mine, em, itself, ''s, whereof, shou''d, theseus, hers, ye, hee, s, myself, interr''d, encompass''d, dy''d, †, yourself, whosoever, ty''d

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, other, many, same, such, first, good, own, more, much, little, whole, common, several, most, greatest, last, old, young, long, certain, publick, present, ancient, few, former, greater, able, small, new, true, full, best, second, ready, dead, better, next, roman, least, necessary, famous, third, free, particular, like, right, very, private, short

not, so, also, then, very, now, up, out, as, more, only, most, first, there, much, thus, therefore, well, together, away, yet, afterwards, off, in, down, sometimes, rather, never, presently, onely, too, again, before, still, likewise, long, even, on, soon, no, always, here, often, far, indeed, about, all, over, forth, ever

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.