Distant Reader - subject-plague-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 108 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,430,561 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 13,369 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 90. 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:

may, therefore, god, shall, doth, will, one, also, things, yet, much, made, first, self, good, many, plague, take, man, now, great, time, life, thing, let, make, nature, like, without, neither, body, water, place, us, men, every, two, cause, must, indeed, part, well, haue, blood, lord, death, little, might, reason, spirit

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Van Helmont's works containing his most excellent philosophy, physick, chirurgery, anatomy : wherein the philosophy of the schools is examined, their errors refuted, and the whole body of physick reformed and rectified : being a new rise and progresse of philosophy and medicine, for the cure of diseases, and lengthening of life / made English by J.C. ..., Britain''s remembrancer containing a narration of the plague lately past; a declaration of the mischiefs present; and a prediction of iudgments to come; (if repentance prevent not.) It is dedicated (for the glory of God) to posteritie; and, to these times (if they please) by Geo: Wither., and Thesaurus chirurgiae : the chirurgical and anatomical works of Paul Barbette ... composed according to the doctrine of the circulation of the blood, and other new inventions of the moderns : together with a treatise of the plague, illustrated with observations / translated out of Low-Dutch into English ... ; to which is added the surgeon''s chest, furnished both with instruments and medicines ... and to make it more compleat, is adjoyned a treatise of diseases that for the most part attend camps and fleets ; written in High-Dutch by Raymundus Minderius..

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

english books, early english, books online, mean time, sensitive soul, next place, text creation, creation partnership, page images, two ounces, neither doth, venal blood, taken away, two drams, whole body, every one, must needs, one onely, venal bloud, one ounce, let vs, tcp schema, represented either, image sets, characters represented, long life, therefore also, bring forth, take away, vital spirit, let us, efficient cause, shall bee, will never, three drams, set downe, many things, much lesse, living creatures, many times, three ounces, haue beene, god will, much less, brought forth, will make, one dram, early works, black choler, god doth

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are A proclamation, for a publick general fast throughout the kingdom of Scotland. At Edinburgh, the eight day of August, one thousand six hundred and sixty five years. Proclamation, discharging trade and commerce with the city of London, and other places of the Kingdom of England, suspected of the plague. At Edinburgh, the twenty one of December, one thousand six hundred sixty five., and Londons disease, and cure: being a soveraigne receipt against the plague, for prevention sake. / By John Qvarles, philo-medicus..

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, plague, god, lord, london, haue, early, city, thy, pestilence, man, church, good, gods, christ, body, world, time, thou, nature, maiesties, land, citie, air, psal, patient, ounce, medicines, king, hath, english, death, countrey, water, vinegar, spirit, roses, iustices, infection, disease, word, truth, thee, tei, soule, remedies, pest, people, peace, parish

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 hath, and An act for the charitable reliefe and ordering of person infected with the plague 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, doth, time, self, thing, man, place, body, life, men, part, water, nature, blood, hath, death, reason, heart, day, cause, matter, fire, others, way, manner, nothing, sin, wit, parts, times, people, heat, air, length, light, hand, plague, text, power, persons, one, places, soul, ounce, ▪, end, none, t, whence, mind

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, do, was, being, were, had, made, take, been, did, let, make, come, say, said, according, hath, taken, see, put, know, seeing, concerning, called, found, done, brought, doth, give, set, known, haue, bring, infected, lay, thought, given, am, sent, call, go, think, self, having, seen, drawn, bee

Proper Nouns

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

god, thou, hath, plague, lord, ●, 〉, ◊, 〈, london, tcp, spirit, c., archeus, haue, gods, doe, diseases, disease, yea, doth, life, nature, earth, christ, soul, schooles, text, man, city, salt, schools, idea, choler, medicines, water, english, bee, liver, heaven, stone, chap, world, eebo, tei, fever, paracelsus, wine, church, pestilence

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, his, he, them, you, our, we, its, my, him, your, thy, me, us, her, themselves, she, thee, himself, vp, one, mine, theirs, ours, ye, vnto, yours, itself, ''s, whereof, l, s, thou, hers, ''em, yee, whosoever, ourselves, o, hitherto, ●, ng, lye, ib, gs, elias, ay

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?"

such, other, same, many, great, own, good, more, first, little, much, whole, true, most, least, certain, doth, new, dead, greater, natural, common, proper, vital, cold, full, last, small, like, hot, old, very, able, present, better, long, next, second, sufficient, best, strong, sick, former, few, early, free, wise, particular, white, vain

not, so, therefore, then, also, more, as, now, up, indeed, yet, most, out, very, well, much, even, together, forth, only, onely, away, first, otherwise, thereof, never, thus, there, too, truly, here, presently, sometimes, far, down, likewise, rather, again, in, especially, long, before, once, often, no, off, afterwards, still, easily, else

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.