Distant Reader - subject-religionAndScience-gutenberg

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 2021-06-09 by Eric Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>. The carrel was created using the Distant Reader gutenberg process, and the input was the result of a query applied to a local mirror of Project Gutenberg -- facet_subject:"Religion and science". Then, for future reference, the results were saved to a Zip file complete with rudimentary bibliographics. The name of the file is input-file.zip. The Zip file was then unpacked and the contents saved to a cache as well as a directory 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 37 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 2,583,416 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 73,811 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 65. 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:

one, man, may, great, will, god, science, time, world, us, nature, first, must, life, see, even, men, now, many, also, earth, made, two, new, every, human, much, work, history, fact, years, natural, matter, church, still, theory, yet, well, present, scientific, like, mind, without, far, whole, century, religion, knowledge, found, place

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, The Philosophy of Natural Theology An Essay in confutation of the scepticism of the present day, and The Popes and Science The History of the Papal Relations to Science During the Middle Ages and Down to Our Own Time.

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

let us, middle ages, years ago, thousand years, nineteenth century, new testament, old testament, hundred years, natural science, one hundred, new york, one another, et seq, human race, natural selection, well known, tells us, present day, took place, seventeenth century, sixteenth century, sacred books, human mind, physical science, thirteenth century, present time, eighteenth century, heavenly bodies, modern science, natural history, first place, every one, natural theology, two hundred, old red, modern times, many years, united states, medical science, common sense, jesus christ, see also, de la, human nature, medical school, years later, tell us, solar system, two thousand, moral law

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The Popes and Science The History of the Papal Relations to Science During the Middle Ages and Down to Our Own Time History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, and The Testimony of the Rocks or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed.

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:

god, man, bible, lord, christian, nature, science, church, christianity, christ, scripture, new, life, great, dr., darwin, time, mr., jesus, st., professor, testament, form, creator, world, religion, mind, law, jews, footnote, fact, europe, chapter, sir, rome, paul, moses, john, history, genesis, england, egypt, creation, animal, theory, roman, pope, peter, old, natural

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 man, and Lectures and Essays 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:

man, nature, world - Thoughts on Religion
god, time, great - The Popes and Science The History of the Papal Relations to Science During the Middle Ages and Down to Our Own Time
church, great, century - History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom
man, earth, god - The Origin of the World According to Revelation and Science
great, man, world - The Testimony of the Rocks or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed

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?":

man, time, world, science, life, nature, men, earth, years, fact, history, work, theory, matter, knowledge, mind, century, animals, day, religion, things, truth, place, power, existence, creation, part, law, view, species, form, idea, period, p., nothing, development, way, facts, question, evidence, reason, evolution, light, order, case, sense, thought, laws, forms, death

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, was, have, are, has, been, were, had, see, made, do, found, being, find, does, did, said, know, say, known, given, says, make, called, seen, come, seems, give, let, take, believe, having, according, show, came, think, taken, become, brought, supposed, done, seem, am, go, put, created, developed, became, appear

Proper Nouns

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

_, god, church, bible, mr., christ, st., dr., christianity, pp, jesus, vol, lord, new, pope, de, europe, john, professor, heaven, science, darwin, rome, ii, nature, england, genesis, testament, old, christian, creator, father, paul, heavens, university, moses, london, man, france, ., i., holy, thou, middle, ages, america, sir, christians, chap, papal

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, his, we, he, they, its, their, i, our, them, us, him, you, my, himself, itself, me, themselves, her, your, she, ourselves, one, myself, thy, thee, ours, herself, yourself, theirs, thyself, mine, ye, yourselves, yours, ii, à, whence, oneself, ce, whereof, ib, historical.--jesus, em, yt, worship--"they, world,--they, with,--for, whosoever, vision,--does

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, human, more, own, scientific, new, natural, true, present, certain, whole, modern, old, different, religious, little, much, general, few, moral, good, physical, last, various, higher, important, divine, common, possible, long, second, spiritual, christian, least, most, ancient, necessary, special, organic, early, full, greater, mere, highest, able

not, so, only, more, most, even, now, very, also, as, then, still, up, thus, far, well, out, however, here, yet, therefore, especially, ever, much, never, just, indeed, too, always, once, first, again, all, down, less, already, often, perhaps, away, long, quite, on, almost, no, there, back, rather, merely, certainly, really

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.