Distant Reader - subject-horsemanship-gutenberg

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 2021-06-06 by Eric Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>. The carrel was created using the Distant Reader gutenberg process, and the input was the result of a query applied to a local mirror of Project Gutenberg -- facet_subject:"Horsemanship". Then, for future reference, the results were saved to a Zip file complete with rudimentary bibliographics. The name of the file is input-file.zip. The Zip file was then unpacked and the contents saved to a cache as well as a directory 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 37 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,530,012 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 41,351 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:

will, horse, tad, one, time, right, well, may, hand, back, get, must, now, rider, saddle, boys, little, stacy, make, good, professor, go, know, head, way, ned, left, first, see, boy, two, side, much, man, like, riding, without, take, horses, pony, never, made, going, away, think, long, us, just, ride, chunky

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The American Horsewoman, The Horsewoman: A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed., and A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey''s Art of Taming Horses With the Substance of the Lectures at the Round House, and Additional Chapters on Horsemanship and Hunting, for the Young and Timid.

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

fat boy, pony rider, tad butler, professor zepplin, rider boys, ned rector, right hand, stacy brown, left hand, answered tad, asked tad, one side, will find, horse will, right leg, left leg, young man, one hand, pony riders, walter perkins, laughed tad, will make, rider boy, years ago, will take, little finger, take care, let us, will soon, will give, get away, come back, hind legs, first time, near side, left foot, asked ned, will go, short time, go back, let go, horse may, two boys, rider will, last night, grand canyon, young lady, toll slowly, right knee, will never

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The Pony Rider Boys in Louisiana; or, Following the Game Trails in the Canebrake The Pony Rider Boys in New England; or, An Exciting Quest in the Maine Wilderness, and The Pony Rider Boys with the Texas Rangers; Or, On the Trail of the Border Bandits.

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:

horse, hand, rider, tad, stacy, professor, ned, chunky, good, right, rein, lady, ride, pony, mr., butler, leg, walter, rector, illustration, zepplin, saddle, chapter, man, english, boys, time, sir, london, left, hunting, fig, day, brown, thomas, stirrup, riding, pupil, mount, lord, like, leicestershire, india, hound, head, hank, gilpin, frank, foot, fence

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 horse, and The Pony Rider Boys in Texas; Or, The Veiled Riddle of the Plains 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:

tad, stacy, boys - The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon; Or, The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch
horse, hand, rider - The Horsewoman: A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed.
horse, good, hounds - Geoffery Gambado A Simple Remedy for Hypochondriacism and Melancholy Splenetic Humours
tad, pony, foot - The Pony Rider Boys in Texas; Or, The Veiled Riddle of the Plains
jack, ranch, frieda - The Ranch Girls and Their Heart''s Desire

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?":

horse, time, hand, way, saddle, boy, head, man, rider, side, boys, horses, lady, reins, animal, camp, feet, hands, place, day, foot, guide, one, men, ground, pony, leg, eyes, something, legs, body, night, position, part, nothing, water, anything, face, moment, hunting, mouth, thing, others, right, lad, neck, country, case, work, bit

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, had, have, do, are, were, been, ''s, did, has, get, make, go, know, see, take, being, made, said, going, think, come, say, give, let, ride, keep, got, find, riding, answered, asked, am, having, put, came, does, want, found, ''m, ''ve, tell, look, done, went, heard, saw, called

Proper Nouns

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

_, tad, stacy, ned, professor, chunky, mr., butler, frank, bob, walter, pony, rider, rector, zepplin, boys, brown, jack, chapter, indian, fig, john, jim, mrs., horse, hand, lilly, master, saddle, c., tom, perkins, doctor, lige, billy, indians, captain, canyon, gallop, frieda, london, rarey, boy, jean, england, cale, dad, parry, simms, nance

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, he, it, you, his, him, they, we, her, their, them, your, she, my, me, its, our, himself, us, themselves, herself, yourself, myself, one, itself, ourselves, ''s, ''em, yours, thy, mine, thee, ye, ours, em, theirs, yourselves, hers, o, oneself, i''m, yerself, ya, why?--they, it----, horsemen, hisself, bandits, yours,--geoffery, you----you

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, little, good, right, more, same, first, great, few, many, own, young, old, left, much, such, long, best, able, fat, short, better, sure, full, possible, ready, necessary, big, last, bad, high, new, second, large, easy, next, small, least, wild, most, certain, several, whole, true, quick, proper, strong, white, low, afraid

not, n''t, up, so, then, out, now, down, well, as, too, back, very, here, more, never, only, away, just, there, off, again, even, on, all, always, far, once, over, in, much, most, still, forward, soon, however, almost, first, ever, enough, perhaps, also, long, thus, right, yet, often, rather, quite, about

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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