Distant Reader - subject-nature-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 7 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 262,640 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 37,520 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 89. 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:

nature, may, will, god, earth, things, one, world, yet, body, great, made, bodies, though, first, parts, man, matter, us, part, creatures, make, therefore, motion, without, many, light, well, divine, much, sun, shall, men, must, hee, doth, air, water, reason, now, good, another, use, might, according, whole, several, thing, say, like

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are A free enquiry into the vulgarly receiv''d notion of nature made in an essay address''d to a friend / by R.B., Fellow of the Royal Society., A demonstration of the existence and providence of God, from the contemplation of the visible structure of the greater and the lesser world in two parts, the first shewing the excellent contrivance of the heavens, earth, sea, &c., the second the wonderful formation of the body of man / by John Edwards ..., and Enchyridion physicæ restitutæ, or, The summary of physicks recovered wherein the true harmony of nature is explained, and many errours of the ancient philosophers, by canons and certain demonstrations, are clearly evidenced and evinced..

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

roman non, let us, one another, dumbe creatures, early english, hee will, take notice, made use, english books, divine providence, heavenly bodies, word nature, first matter, tells us, tell us, books online, several parts, whole body, must needs, every one, divine wisdom, set forth, call nature, make use, every thing, may observe, page images, learned men, living creatures, nothing else, things corporeal, vulgar notion, divine power, taken notice, text creation, praise god, creation partnership, inanimate bodies, mixt beings, whole world, brought forth, will make, great part, human body, radical moisture, natural philosophy, humane bodies, divine author, mixt bodies, middle nature

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are A confutation of atheism from the origin and frame of the world. Part II a sermon preached at St. Martin''s in the Fields, November the 7th, 1692 : being the seventh of the lecture founded by the Honourable Robert Boyle ... / by Richard Bentley ... Anima magica abscondita or a discourse of the universall spirit of nature, with his strange, abstruse, miraculous ascent, and descent. By Eugenius Philalethes., and Enchyridion physicæ restitutæ, or, The summary of physicks recovered wherein the true harmony of nature is explained, and many errours of the ancient philosophers, by canons and certain demonstrations, are clearly evidenced and evinced..

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:

nature, earth, world, sun, matter, god, man, body, air, water, universe, thing, tcp, spirit, soul, providence, power, parts, motion, men, light, head, creatures, bodies, wisdom, wildernesse, waters, vacuum, structure, stomach, stars, sense, sea, roman, right, region, reason, quod, psal, principle, planets, philosophers, phaenomena, owne, opinion, non, naturall, moon, maker, laws

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 nature, and A strange metamorphosis of man, transformed into a vvildernesse Deciphered in characters. 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?":

things, nature, body, t, part, parts, bodies, reason, thing, light, man, way, others, hath, time, matter, air, use, self, doth, nothing, order, works, men, kind, hee, work, author, place, creatures, religion, divers, day, viz, world, end, life, motion, cause, fire, words, blood, one, motions, purpose, rest, sense, power, whence, form

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, were, being, do, made, make, been, had, according, say, said, hath, take, let, see, think, did, know, give, makes, call, set, thought, having, consider, has, come, speak, seems, find, does, concerning, taken, given, put, am, done, found, brought, observe, seem, fall, prove, tell, suppose, go

Proper Nouns

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

god, nature, earth, 〉, ◊, 〈, world, sun, creatures, motion, man, matter, divine, water, c., bodies, hath, men, heaven, providence, parts, sea, universe, body, i., wisdom, air, l., elements, e., hee, power, heavens, notion, est, de, moon, thou, natural, philosophers, soul, fire, yea, creation, being, light, discourse, phaenomena, tcp, animals

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, they, i, their, he, them, his, we, its, our, him, us, you, her, my, she, me, themselves, himself, your, itself, thy, one, thee, ours, herself, theirs, myself, †, mine, vp, ye, ‖, vnto, us''d, tart, ourselves, observ''d, impair''d, ador''d

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, such, many, same, first, more, several, whole, good, true, particular, little, own, most, much, proper, natural, excellent, greater, least, former, -, non, necessary, common, certain, roman, general, very, present, different, wise, useful, peculiar, various, able, perfect, divine, lower, wonderful, full, admirable, fit, vast, sensible, strange, last, few, cold

not, so, more, very, then, as, therefore, most, well, thus, here, now, only, yet, up, also, even, out, much, never, sometimes, first, rather, especially, forth, together, indeed, perhaps, far, onely, all, too, there, in, again, down, often, ever, particularly, otherwise, else, still, long, generally, before, at, less, further, off, enough

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.