Distant Reader - subject-libelAndSlander-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 12 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 266,050 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 22,170 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:

will, one, may, man, god, words, shall, case, men, yet, spirit, like, action, good, without, vnto, great, award, many, though, made, time, another, say, must, now, make, much, therefore, lord, first, things, let, might, world, detraction, law, hee, also, well, vpon, common, reason, plaintiffe, owne, doe, haue, doth, others, thing

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The arraignment of slander periury blasphemy, and other malicious sinnes shewing sundry examples of Gods iudgements against the ofenders. As well by the testimony of the Scriptures, and of the fathers of the primatiue church as likewise out of the reportes of Sir Edward Dier, Sir Edward Cooke, and other famous lawiers of this kingdome. Published by Sir William Vaughan knight., Actions for slaunder, or, A methodicall collection under certain grounds and heads of what words are actionable in the law and what not a treatise of very great use and consequence to all men, especially in these times wherein actions for slaunder are more common and do much more abound then in times past, and when the malice of men so much increases, well may their tongue want a directory : to which is added awards or arbitrements methodified under severall grounds and heads collected out of our year-books and other private authentick authorities ... / by Jo. March., and The government of the tongue by the author of The whole duty of man, &c..

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

kings bench, holy ghost, action will, early english, english books, books online, will lie, coke lib, creation partnership, text creation, let vs, like vnto, page images, common law, will beare, action lies, case cited, wise man, yet notwithstanding, sauiour christ, defendant pleaded, let us, good men, mine owne, detraction conuicted, common pleas, tcp schema, man say, characters represented, represented either, scandalous words, image sets, chiefe iustice, must needs, man may, every man, holy water, may well, one another, particular damage, may bee, vnto vs, honest men, nameless author, many things, one say, inward man, third person, will never, like manner

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The case of Mr. Wynne, against Capell, Swaine and Price, petitioners. To the honourable the knights, citizens, and burgesses in this present Parliament assembled The humble petition of Clement VValker, and William Prynne, Esquires., and Advertisement by Dr. Monro Presbyter of the Church of Scotland..

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, man, church, lord, king, good, god, thing, spirit, people, law, iustice, gods, detraction, court, world, word, wit, vpon, trinity, tongue, time, thy, soule, sonne, serpent, self, sect, sea, scripture, sauiour, sathan, saints, prov, prophet, prison, prince, poverty, plaintiffe, piety, persons, parliament, parish, papists, owne, neighbors, men, maiesty, maiestie, lineament

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 The arraignment of slander periury blasphemy, and other malicious sinnes shewing sundry examples of Gods iudgements against the ofenders. As well by the testimony of the Scriptures, and of the fathers of the primatiue church as likewise out of the reportes of Sir Edward Dier, Sir Edward Cooke, and other famous lawiers of this kingdome. Published by Sir William Vaughan knight. 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?":

man, words, case, men, action, award, time, things, spirit, world, reason, thing, others, t, part, power, day, nothing, life, hee, kings, body, soule, cause, person, nature, name, word, hath, spirits, tongue, cap, death, way, submission, cases, matter, heart, mens, persons, spirituall, selfe, text, truth, people, none, self, place, glory, knowledge

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, have, were, had, do, said, being, made, did, make, say, let, been, see, know, brought, am, according, take, done, has, put, vnto, adjudged, lie, come, think, set, give, taken, beare, bee, find, found, hath, given, neuer, spoken, stand, makes, become, haue, bring, thought, sent, conceive, fall

Proper Nouns

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

god, thou, lord, spirit, detraction, hath, 〉, ◊, 〈, law, king, ●, plaintiffe, doe, gods, c., owne, christ, holy, court, church, tcp, father, bench, diuell, iustice, h., mans, b., e., haue, t, ghost, defendant, lineament, lib, action, s., tongue, hee, downe, ye, yea, loue, vp, english, sonne, prince, common, text

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?"

his, it, i, he, their, they, our, them, him, we, my, me, thy, your, you, her, themselves, us, she, himself, thee, its, mine, ''s, one, vp, theirs, vnto, ye, elias, yours, hers, yee, severall, vvith, us''d, thou, ours, ●, wr, whereof, ts, trodden, soe''re, quo, pelf, ouerlong, neyther, l, kicke

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, such, good, many, great, same, more, own, actionable, true, common, first, false, much, little, void, whole, like, wise, least, last, most, greater, full, very, former, best, holy, better, next, second, particular, sure, glorious, wicked, honest, present, few, early, old, dead, ill, heauenly, third, high, possible, english, worthy, worse, long

not, so, then, more, as, now, therefore, also, only, out, very, most, yet, well, thus, here, too, much, before, there, onely, rather, likewise, first, up, never, indeed, away, even, perhaps, in, together, sometimes, all, otherwise, no, else, often, once, long, ever, vs, still, certainly, forth, thereof, off, down, alone, again

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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