Distant Reader - subject-slavesWritingsAmerican-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 2021-06-10 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:"Slaves' writings, American". 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 8 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 164,109 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 23,444 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 80. 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, time, day, man, us, slave, mr, mother, master, house, will, made, two, great, came, slaves, new, now, little, children, place, years, plantation, night, god, never, work, epps, state, life, old, long, away, many, much, back, free, go, may, well, three, without, might, way, bayou, first, every, hand, white, cotton

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Twelve Years a Slave Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation near the Red River in Louisiana, Biography of a Slave, Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson, a Preacher of the United Brethren Church, While a Slave in the South. Together with Startling Occurrences Incidental to Slave Life., and Memories of Childhood''s Slavery Days.

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

bayou boeuf, solomon northup, one day, pine woods, short time, red river, next day, uncle abram, sandy hill, years old, great house, uncle ben, white man, colored man, hundred dollars, slave pen, run away, master epps, cotton field, free man, aunt phebe, mintus northup, colored people, five dollars, james wilson, two years, thousand dollars, white men, free citizen, long time, edwin epps, fort edward, years ago, united states, one hundred, master ford, new master, dollars per, two weeks, first time, three days, five hundred, great many, three weeks, lunsford lane, next morning, william ford, big cane, five years, short distance

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Twelve Years a Slave Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation near the Red River in Louisiana Biography of a Slave, Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson, a Preacher of the United Brethren Church, While a Slave in the South. Together with Startling Occurrences Incidental to Slave Life., and Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom Or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery.

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:

mr., god, state, mother, lord, york, wilson, washington, union, tibeats, thompson, spirit, south, solomon, smith, slave, saratoga, river, raleigh, platt, patsey, orleans, northup, north, new, mrs., mitchell, master, mary, marksville, lunsford, lewis, lawrence, judge, jesus, governor, freeman, ford, epps, eliza, day, dansley, clayton, child, chapin, captain, burch, boston, boeuf, berry

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 time, and Memoir of Old Elizabeth, A Coloured Woman 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:

time, master, mr - Biography of a Slave, Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson, a Preacher of the United Brethren Church, While a Slave in the South. Together with Startling Occurrences Incidental to Slave Life.
epps, said, bayou - Twelve Years a Slave Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation near the Red River in Louisiana
mother, little, day - Memories of Childhood''s Slavery Days
lord, felt, spirit - Memoir of Old Elizabeth, A Coloured Woman
profession, upward, wrought - Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom Or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery

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, day, man, mother, slave, house, master, slaves, years, children, night, place, plantation, life, way, wife, hand, men, work, cotton, family, hands, field, morning, heart, days, freedom, mistress, cabin, name, dollars, nothing, people, year, father, manner, letter, one, child, friends, business, slavery, city, miles, yard, light, country, death, woman, 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:

was, had, is, be, were, have, been, are, said, made, do, did, came, has, being, go, see, take, found, went, told, come, left, make, knew, taken, heard, took, having, called, know, get, felt, gave, put, got, am, sold, returned, going, became, seemed, say, sent, thought, let, brought, remained, seen, passed

Proper Nouns

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

_, mr., epps, god, new, northup, wilson, state, bayou, ford, washington, york, ben, solomon, boeuf, master, lord, mrs., tibeats, bass, burch, south, patsey, platt, eliza, orleans, north, freeman, marksville, uncle, smith, anne, john, thompson, chapin, river, chapter, william, mary, judge, james, abram, thou, henry, heaven, governor, slavery, slave, dansley, st.

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, he, his, me, it, her, him, they, she, we, them, their, you, our, us, myself, its, your, himself, themselves, ourselves, thy, one, herself, itself, mine, thee, yourself, ''em, yours, theirs, you''re, thyself, ours, hers, em, whereof, rose,--, on''t, manifest.--but, i''m

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, such, great, little, free, many, old, white, good, same, own, more, first, long, last, much, next, large, few, colored, small, young, new, whole, short, several, poor, full, black, only, necessary, ready, latter, possible, true, able, high, hard, happy, dark, best, human, dead, negro, usual, certain, unable, further, present, faithful

not, so, then, up, now, as, out, never, down, away, again, only, there, very, soon, more, back, well, also, however, about, still, n''t, ever, once, much, just, always, here, even, long, too, most, on, home, far, over, finally, immediately, all, often, together, perhaps, off, thus, indeed, in, yet, before, almost

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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