Distant Reader - subject-michigan-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:"Michigan". 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 20 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 833,610 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 41,680 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 84. 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, leaves, long, little, flowers, time, like, two, michigan, old, came, see, now, will, mr, white, first, us, says, man, go, high, made, well, many, back, much, just, great, good, way, father, day, house, went, lake, home, come, know, men, never, summer, may, three, away, small, right, found, near, left

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The Plants of Michigan Simple Keys for the Identification of the Native Seed Plants of the State, Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman With Custer''s Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War, and The Bark Covered House Or, Back In the Woods Again; Being a Graphic and Thrilling Description of Real Pioneer Life in the Wilderness of Michigan.

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

inches long, inch long, says mark, new york, flowers white, united states, lake superior, light brown, feet high, young man, one side, flowering branchlet, terminal bud, winter twig, flowers yellow, early summer, sixth michigan, trevilian station, old man, aunt florence, michigan cavalry, lake michigan, one day, ann arbor, miss whitcom, hardwood forest, one hundred, gogebic lake, many years, first michigan, beaver island, mark tidd, leaves entire, trunk diameter, leaves linear, late spring, dark brown, station june, pistillate flower, old mose, green bay, little traverse, staminate flower, years ago, mackinac island, go back, lower peninsula, next day, next morning, let us

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Michigan Trees: A Handbook of the Native and Most Important Introduced Species The Bark Covered House Or, Back In the Woods Again; Being a Graphic and Thrilling Description of Real Pioneer Life in the Wilderness of Michigan, and History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan A Grammar of Their Language, and Personal and Family History of the Author.

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:

michigan, mr., lake, state, mrs., miss, man, mackinac, long, island, indians, father, york, virginia, new, marjory, little, leave, july, john, illustration, huron, flower, family, detroit, chapter, canada, aunt, august, arbor, wool, woods, wolf, winter, winchester, william, wilde, wild, wicksville, whitcom, west, weed, water, washington, warren, waring, violet, united, trevilian, traverse

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 leaves, and Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman With Custer''s Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War 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:

said, says, little - The Moth Decides: A Novel
leaves, flowers, long - The Plants of Michigan Simple Keys for the Identification of the Native Seed Plants of the State
father, little, came - History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan A Grammar of Their Language, and Personal and Family History of the Author
michigan, men, cavalry - Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman With Custer''s Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War
000, lake, great - Old Mackinaw; Or, The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings

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?":

leaves, time, flowers, man, p., way, day, men, summer, house, dm, place, years, mother, side, father, feet, water, people, night, home, miles, country, illustration, tree, line, life, leaf, things, one, winter, head, eyes, part, morning, spring, days, inches, woods, trees, something, road, face, flower, cavalry, ground, children, river, base, heart

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, had, were, is, be, have, been, are, do, said, did, came, see, ''s, says, made, go, has, went, come, know, found, got, make, get, being, told, going, take, took, seemed, looked, thought, think, seen, saw, left, ''m, say, let, knew, taken, put, called, tell, leaves, heard, look, gone, having

Proper Nouns

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

_, michigan, mr., lake, mark, mrs., father, indians, mabel, billy, l., island, ne, family, custer, july, black, private, au, mackinaw, new, fig, detroit, general, bettie, jean, miss, st., skip, needham, ke, brown, june, marjory, alice, louise, point, august, state, john, may, sixth, philip, indian, york, bay, betty, river, c., hilda

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, it, he, his, you, we, they, her, she, him, my, their, me, them, our, its, us, your, himself, myself, herself, themselves, one, ''em, itself, ''s, yourself, thy, mine, ourselves, em, ours, yours, tamarack, thee, hers, i''m, theirs, yer, thyself, you''re, yerself, ye, yourselves, hisself, d''you, oneself, delf, canadensis.=, yes,--jacob

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?"

little, other, old, long, high, many, white, more, good, great, first, small, few, large, young, same, own, red, much, short, last, such, new, dark, several, entire, black, brown, broad, like, wide, yellow, indian, thick, next, green, beautiful, full, early, common, best, most, light, blue, right, glabrous, less, hard, thin, ready

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

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.