Distant Reader - subject-silk-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 2021-05-25 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 7 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 278,770 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 39,824 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, one, like, great, forth, made, yet, water, many, make, two, time, shall, also, sea, man, much, first, things, saith, page, found, must, part, little, nature, bee, men, long, chap, de, tree, wine, silk, earth, put, set, sun, day, without, trees, good, fire, come, place, take, bees, leaves, worms

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are An history of the wonderful things of nature set forth in ten severall classes wherein are contained I. The wonders of the heavens, II. Of the elements, III. Of meteors, IV. Of minerals, V. Of plants, VI. Of birds, VII. Of four-footed beasts, VIII. Of insects, and things wanting blood, IX. Of fishes, X. Of man / written by Johannes Jonstonus, and now rendred into English by a person of quality., The reformed Common-wealth of bees. Presented in severall letters and observations to Sammuel Hartlib Esq. With The reformed Virginian silk-worm. Containing many excellent and choice secrets, experiments, and discoveries for attaining of national and private profits and riches., and Virginia''s discovery of silke-vvorms, with their benefit and the implanting of mulberry trees : also the dressing and keeping of vines, for the rich trade of making wines there : together with the making of the saw-mill, very usefull in Virginia, for cutting of timber and clapbord, to build with-all, and its conversion to other as profitable uses..

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

page artic, come forth, young ones, must bee, living creatures, will make, comes forth, may bee, page chap, shall find, early english, english books, will bee, will grow, foot long, pound weight, books online, will never, cast forth, new world, came forth, shall see, drawn forth, let us, every one, oft times, whole body, one day, saw one, living creature, send forth, will run, cubits long, pliny saith, will come, young silk, many things, creation partnership, long time, sends forth, text creation, page images, take away, may make, upper part, new wine, many places, page article, will take, one side

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are At the court at Whitehall, June the sixth, 1673. Present the Kings most excellent Majesty His Royal Highness the Duke of York ... Mr Speaker. Whereas by the late address of both Houses of Parliament, His Majesty was humbly desired by his own example to encourage the constant wearing of the manufactures of his own kingdoms and dominions, ... Virgo triumphans, or, Virginia in generall, but the south part therof in particular including the fertile Carolana, and the no lesse excellent island of Roanoak, richly and experimentally valued : humbly presented as the auspice of a beginning yeare, to the Parliament of England, and councell of state / by Edward Williams, Gent., and Virginia''s discovery of silke-vvorms, with their benefit and the implanting of mulberry trees : also the dressing and keeping of vines, for the rich trade of making wines there : together with the making of the saw-mill, very usefull in Virginia, for cutting of timber and clapbord, to build with-all, and its conversion to other as profitable uses..

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, virginia, south, mulberry, worms, world, wine, sun, silk, nature, nation, god, english, creature, wormes, wood, winter, west, wax, waters, vine, vessell, tree, suns, sunne, summer, stars, staple, spring, silke, serpents, sea, scaliger, river, province, plin, page, oyle, olive, north, mulberries, mountain, moone, moon, men, mathiol, man, majesty, maid, loadstone

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 like, and A proclamation for prohibiting the transportation of frames for kniting and making of silk-stockings, and other wearing neccessaries James R. 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?":

time, water, things, part, page, man, men, day, nature, place, fire, parts, leaves, head, heat, way, ground, body, others, trees, matter, dayes, fish, worms, times, thing, blood, ▪, places, belly, ones, seed, foot, hath, stone, reason, feet, colour, cause, kind, nothing, end, skin, self, divers, mouth, stones, eyes, year, earth

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, are, be, was, have, were, made, being, had, make, found, do, put, set, come, take, let, say, cast, been, grow, see, said, hath, bee, saw, taken, did, seen, writes, cut, called, comes, know, give, fall, bred, brought, lay, makes, observed, having, eat, find, think, concerning, run, came, thought, done

Proper Nouns

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

l., c., sea, ●, chap, de, sun, silk, tree, wine, hath, 〉, earth, virginia, pliny, bees, god, plin, 〈, moon, world, bee, honey, vine, saith, ◊, island, river, wee, king, england, nature, ayr, country, hive, countrey, tcp, trees, mulberry, worms, mans, iron, city, mountain, worm, winter, exerc, 2, wormes, english

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, them, their, he, his, you, i, your, her, she, him, we, its, our, my, us, themselves, me, himself, one, thy, thee, ours, theirs, yours, mine, herself, ●, youl, y, whereof, whence, wax, u, trodden, severall, pl, oyl, itself, ch, bl, ''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?"

great, other, many, such, same, little, more, good, much, first, full, small, white, young, old, long, new, hot, greater, whole, certain, saith, own, black, cold, wonderfull, dead, strong, dry, high, thick, common, better, sweet, open, red, like, last, excellent, best, artic, green, noble, most, next, rich, large, hard, second, upper

not, so, forth, then, up, also, very, more, as, out, most, down, there, together, again, onely, off, never, now, much, first, away, well, yet, thus, sometimes, therefore, long, in, only, too, easily, far, almost, presently, hence, here, especially, over, ever, all, often, once, afterwards, about, else, before, soon, lastly, hardly

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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