Distant Reader - subject-mississippiRiverValley-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 2021-06-07 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:"Mississippi River Valley". 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 39 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,539,831 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 42,773 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 80. 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, river, two, great, st, time, made, will, new, now, men, la, first, man, little, many, miles, mississippi, water, day, country, may, found, much, well, three, hundred, every, years, good, long, like, way, place, people, came, never, old, land, de, west, state, louis, without, general, part, make, salle, see, large

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Old Times on the Upper Mississippi The Recollections of a Steamboat Pilot from 1854 to 1863, The History of Louisiana, Or of the Western Parts of Virginia and Carolina Containing a Description of the Countries That Lie on Both Sides of the River Missisippi, and The French in the Heart of America.

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

la salle, new orleans, united states, de la, new york, two hundred, years ago, one hundred, one day, hundred miles, red river, mississippi valley, three hundred, old man, lake michigan, five hundred, five miles, young man, every thing, lake erie, mississippi river, two years, north america, young men, hundred feet, new england, ohio river, feet high, upper mississippi, four hundred, long time, many years, per cent, thousand dollars, fort frontenac, two miles, upper river, five years, great river, next day, feet long, three miles, great lakes, green bay, three years, twenty years, first time, one side, sieur de, rocky mountains

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are France and England in North America, Part III: La Salle, Discovery of The Great West The French in the Heart of America, and The Americans as They Are Described in a tour through the valley of the Mississippi.

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:

new, mississippi, river, st., orleans, tom, mr., louis, illinois, time, man, indians, fort, ohio, french, york, united, states, natchez, missouri, joe, boy, arkansas, sid, kentucky, indian, illustration, huck, general, france, western, west, water, washington, valley, sunday, south, pennsylvania, paul, north, mexico, marquette, louisiana, island, great, cincinnati, chapter, captain, becky, american

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 river, and Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1880-81, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1883, pages 117-166 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, time, man - Life on the Mississippi, Part 9.
great, river, new - The History of Louisiana, Or of the Western Parts of Virginia and Carolina Containing a Description of the Countries That Lie on Both Sides of the River Missisippi
river, miles, country - A New Guide for Emigrants to the West
st, river, boat - Ancient Pottery of the Mississippi Valley Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1882-83, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1886, pages 361-436
la, salle, river - France and England in North America, Part III: La Salle, Discovery of The Great West

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?":

river, time, men, man, day, water, miles, country, years, way, people, place, land, boat, part, feet, side, night, days, head, life, name, house, work, war, town, number, nothing, year, village, others, mouth, hand, order, one, state, fire, course, city, distance, thing, ground, world, trees, waters, point, prairie, stream, end, boats

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, is, had, were, be, are, have, been, has, made, said, do, found, did, came, being, make, see, went, come, go, called, take, took, saw, ''s, know, having, seen, left, find, get, give, told, say, got, gave, put, passed, built, began, set, known, going, given, reached, sent, done, brought, taken

Proper Nouns

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

_, st., la, mississippi, salle, new, louis, illinois, ohio, river, indians, |, de, tom, west, missouri, general, states, fort, france, mr., french, state, orleans, louisiana, captain, paul, lake, united, arkansas, america, m., natchez, washington, valley, york, great, north, indian, galena, south, texas, rebels, iroquois, missisippi, le, c., mexico, hennepin, du

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, he, his, i, they, their, them, its, we, him, you, my, our, me, her, she, us, himself, themselves, your, itself, one, myself, herself, ourselves, yourself, ''em, ours, theirs, thee, mine, thy, ''s, yours, em, meself, ye, yourselves, yerself, you''re, yer, landlord.--a, jackson.--sterling, i-, hers, au, you''ll, yit, yankees"--that, whereof

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, great, many, little, same, first, good, more, few, old, such, large, own, new, several, small, much, long, last, young, high, white, western, indian, whole, french, beautiful, full, most, present, best, fine, general, next, wild, certain, northern, less, early, common, only, rich, dead, strong, deep, second, short, necessary, upper, different

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

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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