Distant Reader - subject-pirates-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 29 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 180,573 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 6,226 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 86. 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:

pound, one, us, men, hundred, text, english, east, dozen, wind, leagues, ship, west, cont, shall, great, tcp, two, made, min, leag, day, time, much, sea, will, many, man, piece, containing, good, may, came, eebo, south, run, first, now, weight, every, early, small, without, latitude, degr, god, king, taken, three, ships

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are An Act for the redemption of captives, The voyages and adventures of Capt. Barth. Sharp and others in the South Sea being a journal of the same : also Capt. Van Horn with his buccanieres surprizing of la Veracruz : to which is added the true relation of Sir Henry Morgan his expedition against the Spaniards in the West-Indies and his taking Panama : together with the president of Panama''s [i.e. Juan Perez de Guzman] account of the same expedition, translated out of Spanish : and Col. Beeston''s adjustment of the peace between the Spaniards and English in the West Indies / published by P.A., Esq., and Compassion towards captives chiefly towards our brethren and country-men who are in miserable bondage in Barbarie. Vrged and pressed in three sermons on Heb. 13.3. Preached in Plymouth, in October 1636. By Charles Fitz-Geffry..

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

early english, english books, hundred weight, books online, run leag, leagues east, text creation, creation partnership, page images, leagues west, twelve pound, twelve dozen, east leag, weight cont, ship called, early works, six score, groce cont, south east, henry every, characters represented, west leag, represented either, tcp schema, image sets, fair weather, sir thomas, five score, images scanned, encoded text, iv tiff, text transcribed, batch review, tcp assigned, institutions providing, encoded edition, xml conversion, pfs batch, proquest page, markup reviewed, commercial purposes, weight containing, bit group, asking permission, without asking, financial support, tiff page, creative commons, providing financial, work described

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Proclamation for apprehending Henry Every, alias Bridgeman, and sundry other pirates. By the King. A proclamation against pirats, and The present state of Algeir being a faithful and true account of the most considerable occurences that happened in that place during the lying of the French fleet before it / in a letter from a gentleman in Algier to his friend in London..

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, king, ship, sea, english, man, henry, ward, captain, wind, west, tunis, town, tonne, thomas, sympathy, startop, south, sir, sally, robert, reader, psal, province, power, pound, pirats, oxford, owne, navy, merchant, men, majesty, maiestie, lord, london, latitude, lantore, l.10, l.06, l.00, island, hollander, haue, god, generall, gand, french, east, early

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 00, and An ordinance of the Lords and Commons assembled in Parliament, for the raising of moneys for redemption of distressed captives. Die Martis, 28. Jan. 1644. Ordered by the Commons assembled in Parliament, that this ordinance be forthwith printed: H: Elsynge, Cler. Parl. D. Com. 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?":

pound, dozen, men, text, day, time, leagues, ship, leag, cont, piece, wind, weight, man, others, texts, goods, weather, works, min, yard, place, night, books, deg, characters, xml, images, ships, score, part, morning, death, work, image, selves, page, way, ▪, edition, people, keying, eebo, voc, nothing, hands, bondage, reason, life, elements

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, be, is, were, have, had, are, being, said, made, did, been, containing, came, run, taken, having, make, come, sent, called, encoded, brought, set, take, according, do, put, went, found, thought, got, remember, give, lay, see, took, making, based, left, given, done, say, gave, carried, let, has, suffer, pay, published

Proper Nouns

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

s., d., 00, east, west, tcp, english, e., sea, south, min, degr, god, latitude, england, wind, ●, n., king, w., men, captain, text, wee, london, groce, cont, tei, eebo, doe, leagues, oxford, sir, 〉, ship, hath, island, dutch, thomas, henry, christians, ward, town, 〈, ◊, proquest, phase, partnership, governour, creation

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?"

we, our, his, they, their, them, he, it, i, him, us, you, her, my, your, me, themselves, himself, she, thy, theirs, yours, ours, thee, its, vp, one, vnto, s, mine, vvith, shewhimself, o, immortall, ian, headmost, g, f, ''s

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, small, good, same, much, more, early, first, english, little, last, true, own, most, available, second, due, best, new, next, short, high, better, several, large, general, old, former, ready, miserable, able, least, full, french, fair, greater, present, illegible, hard, fresh, textual, whole, white, free, vocat, like, possible

not, so, then, very, now, out, more, as, up, most, there, away, well, in, therefore, also, much, about, here, never, thus, off, together, only, rather, online, first, onely, over, thereof, ever, sometimes, early, yet, too, even, likewise, down, before, formerly, further, above, presently, long, ashore, vs, almost, whatsoever, otherwise, still

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.