Distant Reader - subject-meditation-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 58 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 2,370,241 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 40,866 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 96. 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, will, shall, may, lord, us, man, christ, good, things, one, yet, life, great, let, heart, world, love, men, much, make, now, hee, therefore, must, heaven, soul, holy, many, grace, come, time, without, like, day, glory, self, bee, doth, death, see, wee, spirit, made, first, though, ever, art, sin, give

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The confession and conversion of the chiefest and greatest of sinners, with his frequent communion with God, in Christ, by the spirit, or, A garden of spiritual fruits and flowers, Horæ consecratæ, or, Spiritual pastime. concerning divine meditations upon the great mysteries of our faith and salvation : occasional meditations and gratulatory reflexions upon particular providences and deliverances, vouchsafed to the author and his family : also a scripture-catechisme dedicated to the service of his wife and children, and now published, together with other treatises mentioned in the following page for common use / by Sir James Harrington ..., and The great law of consideration: or a discourse, wherein the nature, usefulness, and absolute necessity of consideration, in order to a truly serious and religious life, is laid open: By Anthony Horneck, preacher at the Savoy..

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

jesus christ, let us, holy ghost, iesus christ, holy spirit, lord god, every one, god will, early english, english books, lord jesus, make us, wee may, may bee, ah lord, books online, lord iesus, right hand, must needs, many times, thine owne, every day, will make, every man, shall never, shall see, shall bee, almighty god, page images, will never, will give, hee will, new creature, creation partnership, text creation, may see, man may, vnto vs, one another, heavenly father, christ iesus, bring forth, christ jesus, shall come, one day, whole world, eternal life, take away, many things, give us

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Three heavenly treatises, concerning Christ [brace] 1. His genealogie, 2. His baptisme, 3. His combat with Sathan : together vvith deuout meditations, for Christian consolation and instruction / by Mr. William Cowper ... A guide to the godly, or, The dayly meditations of Returne Hebdon Gentleman who for his conscience (through the tyrany of the Bishops) suffered many years imprisonment in the Kings-Bench and their remained till death : being very useful for instruction of all those that desire to walke in the paths of Jesus Christ., and Grace and mercy to a sinner in a time of afflictions, or, The serious meditations of M. Tho. Ford of Rochester during the time of his imprisonment, before his execution, faithfully delivered from his own copie : together with his funeral sermon, preached by Mr. Wil. Sandbrook, P.M. Rochester / set forth for the strengthning of our faith in Jesus Christ ... ; published for the satisfaction of his friends ... by John Plasse..

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:

god, lord, christ, thy, tcp, man, spirit, father, thou, church, world, thee, soul, saviour, meditation, gods, psal, prayer, good, soule, scripture, life, king, earth, law, faith, christian, saints, mee, jesus, iesus, heaven, hath, glory, bee, thing, holy, hee, heart, great, ghost, devil, angels, word, son, love, body, wee, vpon, time

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 thy, and Three decads of diuine meditations VVhereof each one containeth three parts. 1 A history. 2 An allegory. 3 A prayer. With a commendation of the priuate countrey life. By Alexander Rosse his Maiesties chaplaine in ordinarie. 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, things, life, heart, men, thy, world, time, day, self, death, soul, glory, grace, love, thee, nothing, sin, way, body, faith, thing, selfe, others, art, hee, hath, mercy, hearts, light, power, nature, end, hand, sins, earth, word, doth, soule, thoughts, place, truth, part, peace, eyes, people, flesh, comfort, joy, name

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, have, was, let, do, were, make, had, come, see, made, am, being, give, know, did, take, say, been, hath, live, bee, done, set, blessed, according, put, thou, think, love, consider, find, said, makes, ''s, given, suffer, pray, bring, go, cast, desire, keep, found, become, doe, doth, receive

Proper Nouns

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

god, thou, lord, christ, heaven, 〉, ◊, 〈, hath, wee, hast, thee, spirit, father, doe, gods, holy, ●, hee, jesus, bee, church, world, yea, man, c., earth, saviour, owne, angels, meditation, iesus, haue, mee, cor, son, word, law, art, christian, soul, thine, king, mat, thy, tcp, psal, hell, sonne, wilt

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?"

it, i, his, my, he, thy, our, they, me, their, we, them, him, us, thee, you, your, her, himself, themselves, she, its, mine, ours, one, theirs, vp, yours, ye, vnto, ''em, thou, ''s, l, hers, s, u, em, gods, ourselves, itself, hee, elias, whereof, whosoever, ●, o, myself, yee, vvith

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?"

good, great, such, many, other, more, own, true, much, holy, first, same, little, whole, full, new, glorious, most, best, better, greater, last, heavenly, able, least, greatest, sweet, present, poor, high, very, free, wise, dead, humble, wicked, perfect, spiritual, sure, second, old, right, gracious, ready, everlasting, eternal, saith, small, doth, divine

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

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.