Distant Reader - subject-prisoners-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 30 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 173,056 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 5,768 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 88. 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:

will, may, god, now, text, shall, psal, yet, one, lord, men, time, much, mr, prisoners, good, make, though, prison, day, man, great, like, doe, pro, art, life, made, must, commissioners, tcp, things, well, therefore, place, english, many, without, take, early, let, self, prisoner, give, done, know, come, ecclus, job, law

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are An improvement of imprisonment, disgrace, poverty, into real freedom, honest reputation, perdurable riches evidenced in a few crums & scraps lately found in a prisoners-basket at Newgate, and saved together, by a visitant of oppressed prisoners, for the refreshing of himself and those who are either in a worse prison or (who loathing the dainties of the flesh) hunger and thrist after righteousness / by George Wither., The distressed merchant. And the prisoners comfort in distresse. When he was a prisoner in London, in chap. 49. the reader may take notice of, I. His observations of many passages in prison, during his being there. II. The severall humours and carriages of his fellow prisoners. III. His advice to them, and to some of his and their kin, and unkind friends. IV. Gods singular care and providence over all distressed prisoners, that put their trust in him in all afflictions. / Written by William Bagwell merchant., and An office for prisoners for crimes, together with another for prisoners for debt containing both proper directions, and proper prayers and devotions, for each of their needs and circumstances / by John Kettlewell ....

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

english books, early english, books online, early works, page images, creation partnership, text creation, textual changes, commercial purposes, bit group, xml conversion, encoded edition, online text, creative commons, iv tiff, work described, proquest page, institutions providing, encoded text, images scanned, image set, financial support, markup reviewed, asking permission, tiff page, batch review, providing financial, text transcribed, pfs batch, tcp assigned, without asking, must needs, mona logarbo, humble petition, john lilburne, defects per, jesus christ, god will, british library, standard spellings, standardized format, fully proofread, based collaborative, title catalog, preserves archaic, proofread approx, enrichments aim, changes aim, annotation includes, digital transcription

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The oppressed prisoners complaint of their great oppression: with a loud call to Englands magistrates for the exercise of impartial justice, before the wrath of the lamb break forth. With a brief relation of the unparallel''d proceedings of the court, at the Old Baily, the fifth day of the fifth month, 1662. An improvement of imprisonment, disgrace, poverty, into real freedom, honest reputation, perdurable riches evidenced in a few crums & scraps lately found in a prisoners-basket at Newgate, and saved together, by a visitant of oppressed prisoners, for the refreshing of himself and those who are either in a worse prison or (who loathing the dainties of the flesh) hunger and thrist after righteousness / by George Wither., and The penitent prisoner his character, carriage upon his commitment, letany, proper prayers, serious meditations, sighs, occasional ejaculations, devotion going to execution, and at the place of execution / by a friend to the souls in prison..

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, lord, god, john, world, tower, thou, prisoners, petitioner, mr., man, lilburne, law, king, house, early, commons, time, thy, thomason, thes, thee, text, teachers, statute, soul, sir, sins, sharrack, self, sam, repentance, reason, psal, prophet, pro, prisoner, prison, priests, poem, peters, owne, meditation, mat, love, london, life, joh, hugh, honorable

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 thou, and Certaine characters and essayes of prison and prisoners. Compiled by Nouus Homo a prisoner in the kings bench 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?":

text, men, time, day, man, things, prison, life, place, self, thy, t, art, prisoners, heart, way, thee, friends, works, people, end, selfe, b, nothing, night, l, none, c, books, images, ▪, world, words, others, sins, power, xml, page, work, prisoner, friend, death, care, debt, h, image, times, thing, texts, truth

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, is, was, have, are, had, were, being, do, did, been, make, am, made, said, take, let, give, done, know, come, ''s, brought, see, live, thou, has, sent, according, say, encoded, set, taken, bring, found, having, pay, doe, think, put, read, find, came, wounded, suffer, dost, pray, hear, given, called

Proper Nouns

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

thou, god, psal, lord, mr., c, tcp, d, f, g, e, commissioners, b, ecclus, prisoners, job, doe, hath, john, mat, christ, m, k, h, pro, q, london, law, hast, english, t, thomason, l, cor, thy, text, england, king, gods, prisoner, house, thee, c., justice, chap, sir, le, u, commons, r

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?"

i, my, they, his, it, their, you, he, me, them, your, thy, him, we, thee, our, her, us, she, themselves, himself, mine, theirs, vp, its, u, s, ''s, yours, thou, f, ye, one, l, †, did''st, yoak''d, vouchsaf''d, severall, non, lov''st, k, elias

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, good, other, great, many, much, more, same, own, early, true, free, last, english, first, little, present, most, best, least, better, poor, late, humble, textual, wicked, whole, false, available, able, full, old, long, due, sick, several, honest, sure, former, high, worse, common, small, wise, few, rich, ready, like, innocent, sad

not, then, so, now, here, more, therefore, as, yet, up, well, most, also, thus, much, out, never, still, ever, away, very, there, only, pro, in, thereof, all, long, too, just, forth, early, online, likewise, onely, together, thereby, even, first, else, no, above, before, humbly, alone, down, therein, quite, at, often

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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