subject-postalService-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 11 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 48,273 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 4,388 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 82. 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:

shall, act, thomas, sir, one, county, aforesaid, iohn, every, text, letters, persons, post, william, mr, esq, time, tcp, john, person, gent, england, day, city, english, six, may, thousand, enacted, hundred, robert, office, several, eebo, henry, town, money, master, early, majesty, general, richard, will, street, made, george, authority, lord, thereof, london

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Anno Regni Caroli II. Regis Angliæ, Scotiæ, Franciæ, & Hiberniæ, duodecimo. At the Parliament begun at Westminster, the five and twentieth day of April, an. Dom. 1660 In the twelfth year of the reign of our most gracious soveraign lord Charles, by the grace of God, of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, &c., The practical method of the penny-post being a sheet very necessary for all persons to have by them ... : With an explaination [sic] of the following stamps for the marking of all letters., and By the King. A proclamation, for quieting the Post-Master-General in the execution of his office..

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

one thousand, six hundred, thousand six, early english, english books, books online, authority aforesaid, sir william, text creation, creation partnership, excellent majesty, page images, thousand pounds, provided alwayes, early works, hundred fifty, first day, thing therein, therein contained, sir thomas, tcp schema, characters represented, sir iohn, contrary notwithstanding, image sets, represented either, parliament assembled, every letter, like port, provided also, present act, near holborn, postal service, present parliament, exceeding one, provided always, persons whatsoever, anno xii, twentieth day, shall forfeit, encoded edition, pfs batch, tiff page, great britain, image set, online text, without asking, tcp assigned, wise notwithstanding, creative commons

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are By the King. A proclamation, for quieting the Post-Master-General in the execution of his office. To the Right Honorable, the Councel of State And to the Honorable Committee, by them appointed in the case of the post-masters. The humble petition of the post-masters of the several roads of England., and To all ingenuous people a second intimation from the New Undertakers for conveyance of letters at half the rates to severall parts of England and Scotland..

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, office, william, town, thursdayes, thomas, state, sir, post, penny, new, mr., master, majesty, majesties, maiesties, letters, john, iohn, honorable, holborn, gent, esq, county, city, authority, act

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 shall, and By the King. A proclamation, for quieting the Post-Master-General in the execution of his office. 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:

1. shall - Anno Regni Caroli II. Regis Angliæ, Scotiæ, Franciæ, & Hiberniæ, duodecimo. At the Parliament begun at Westminster, the five and twentieth day of April, an. Dom. 1660 In the twelfth year of the reign of our most gracious soveraign lord Charles, by the grace of God, of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, &c.
2. text - The practical method of the penny-post being a sheet very necessary for all persons to have by them ... : With an explaination [sic] of the following stamps for the marking of all letters.
3. street - A brief director for those that would send their letters to any parts of England, Scotlaud, or Ireland. Or A list of all the carriers, waggoners coaches, posts, ships, barks, hoys, and passage-boats, that come to London, from the most parts and places, by land & sea Alphabetically printed, so that none may pretend ignorance, who would gladly send, but know not where to carry their letters. With the dayes when they come, and when they return. And also to send letters to the most habitable parts of the world, and to have an answer.

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:

1. shall, said, act - Anno Regni Caroli II. Regis Angliæ, Scotiæ, Franciæ, & Hiberniæ, duodecimo. At the Parliament begun at Westminster, the five and twentieth day of April, an. Dom. 1660 In the twelfth year of the reign of our most gracious soveraign lord Charles, by the grace of God, of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, &c.
2. text, tcp, post - The practical method of the penny-post being a sheet very necessary for all persons to have by them ... : With an explaination [sic] of the following stamps for the marking of all letters.
3. street, thursdayes, holborn - A brief director for those that would send their letters to any parts of England, Scotlaud, or Ireland. Or A list of all the carriers, waggoners coaches, posts, ships, barks, hoys, and passage-boats, that come to London, from the most parts and places, by land & sea Alphabetically printed, so that none may pretend ignorance, who would gladly send, but know not where to carry their letters. With the dayes when they come, and when they return. And also to send letters to the most habitable parts of the world, and to have an answer.
4. passage, returns, help - To all ingenuous people a second intimation from the New Undertakers for conveyance of letters at half the rates to severall parts of England and Scotland.
5. passage, returns, help - To all ingenuous people a second intimation from the New Undertakers for conveyance of letters at half the rates to severall parts of England and Scotland.

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?":

persons, time, person, text, day, letters, money, texts, thing, pounds, parts, works, places, characters, xml, books, image, street, place, pence, images, work, year, page, contrary, keying, esq, eebo, edition, service, post, elements, purposes, -, sums, project, manner, encoding, data, morning, port, vertue, title, rates, posts, kings, head, use, alwayes, users

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:

be, said, is, have, are, aforesaid, been, was, enacted, were, made, being, do, appointed, provided, paid, encoded, according, make, had, contained, sent, send, iames, take, based, mentioned, pay, carried, paying, come, exceeding, belonging, given, declared, allowed, -, has, delivered, received, published, marked, left, give, extend, conveyed, represented, created, create, corrected

Proper Nouns

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

thomas, act, sir, county, iohn, william, mr., tcp, john, post, esq, gent, england, city, ●, robert, henry, town, office, majesty, richard, george, master, letters, 〉, lord, london, edward, parliament, -, vvilliam, majesties, authority, knight, english, 〈, oxford, ◊, text, general, ireland, tei, eebo, baronet, law, charles, samuel, commons, commissioners, thursdayes

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?"

their, his, them, it, they, our, your, i, we, he, him, you, her, us, themselves, its, my, me, himself

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, several, early, first, english, respective, aforesaid, present, due, great, good, like, available, true, greater, more, former, many, own, late, general, illegible, second, further, double, speedy, lawful, better, textual, possible, much, certain, necessary, last, usual, original, keyboarded, gracious, full, financial, commercial, subject, green, whole, proofread, new, large, wide

not, so, then, thereof, most, further, also, hereby, in, whatsoever, therefore, out, now, therein, very, respectively, online, hereafter, early, as, above, up, heretofore, always, otherwise, onely, formerly, sometimes, off, even, before, well, there, over, only, fully, proportionably, never, usually, more, first, especially, variously, together, respectfully, notably, no, mainly, accurately, once

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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