Distant Reader - subject-smallpox-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 6 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 680,557 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 113,426 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 90. 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:

blood, parts, part, little, one, also, vessels, body, first, two, may, reason, heart, many, small, great, seed, time, like, spirits, substance, self, brain, sometimes, much, without, together, nerves, womb, muscles, yet, forth, arteries, motion, several, therefore, veins, head, others, will, whole, matter, bone, three, use, another, found, man, quantity, certain

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The anatomy of human bodies, comprehending the most modern discoveries and curiosities in that art to which is added a particular treatise of the small-pox & measles : together with several practical observations and experienced cures ... / written in Latin by Ijsbrand de Diemerbroeck ... ; translated from the last and most correct and full edition of the same, by William Salmon ..., A short discourse on the rise, nature, and management of the small-pox, and all putrid fevers occasioned by the death of our late incomparable queen : together with a philosophical account of an excellent remedy for these and many other diseases / by T. Byfield ..., and An elenchus of opinions concerning the cure of the small pox together with problematicall questions concerning the cure of the French pest / by T. Whitaker ....

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

animal spirits, small pox, whole body, many times, upper part, great quantity, hinder part, vena cava, lower part, lymphatic vessels, hollow vein, little branches, like manner, arterious blood, mean time, milkie vessels, inner parts, next day, tells us, os sacrum, inner part, de graef, umbilical vessels, greater quantity, every way, regner de, small quantity, left ventricle, rational soul, bearing vessels, right ventricle, short time, every day, sends forth, teaches us, lower parts, left side, salt particles, come forth, sixth pair, uterine liver, several parts, taken away, great artery, right side, made use, greatest part, much less, seminary vessels, milky vessels

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are An elenchus of opinions concerning the cure of the small pox together with problematicall questions concerning the cure of the French pest / by T. Whitaker ... The charitable pestmaster, or, The cure of the plague conteining a few short and necessary instructions how to preserve the body from infection of the plagve as also to cure those that are infected : together with a little treatise concerning the cure of the small pox : published for the benefit of the poore of this city and not unmeet for the rich / by Thomas Shervvood ..., and A short relation of some words and expressions that were spoken by Barbara scaife in time of her sickness, a little before she departed this life she was betwixt fifteen and sixteen years of age, daughter to William and Issabel Scaife of the Blacksike near Appleby, in the county of Westmerland: in profession of the principles of light and life in Christ Jesus. Which those people commonly called Quakers do bear testimony to, and had fellowship with, from their child-hood, and had a care upon them to bring up their children in the fear of the Lord, and in the knowledge of that truth which they had believed in: and which their children were in their tender age truly acquainted with..

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, disease, spirits, pox, patient, nature, fever, womb, woman, water, vomit, vii, vessels, ventricle, vena, veins, use, tunicle, tongue, substance, stones, stomach, spleen, soul, small, skin, seed, remedy, region, reason, pores, plague, pestilence, parts, particles, pair, pain, opinion, nourishment, nostrils, nerves, neck, nation, muscles, mouth, motion, men, membranes, medicine, matter

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 blood, and An elenchus of opinions concerning the cure of the small pox together with problematicall questions concerning the cure of the French pest / by T. Whitaker ... 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?":

blood, part, parts, reason, body, time, heart, others, self, vessels, seed, quantity, side, things, veins, manner, day, thing, way, nourishment, times, man, length, nothing, rest, substance, use, cause, women, bones, beginning, opinion, place, end, skin, arteries, branches, men, days, womb, milk, thence, regard, eyes, years, one, necessity, roots, motion, means

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, are, being, was, have, were, had, has, found, said, made, do, been, does, let, make, according, taken, says, say, seen, carried, take, called, generated, pass, separated, flow, come, give, having, seems, writes, happens, concerning, appears, flows, inserted, seeing, proceed, divided, find, did, grow, flowing, thought, comes, cut, extended

Proper Nouns

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

〉, ◊, 〈, brain, parts, spirits, muscles, head, nerves, liver, vessels, substance, womb, s., matter, motion, c., vein, membrane, arteries, animal, chylus, j., birth, bone, seed, muscle, humors, stomach, ventricle, veins, pox, eye, spleen, pair, heart, membranes, liquor, choler, lungs, part, spirit, patient, tunicle, juice, heat, soul, colour, blood, man

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, he, their, his, i, its, them, her, we, him, she, themselves, us, my, you, our, ''em, himself, me, your, em, one, dy''d, ʒ, thy, ours, us''d, thee, itself, herself, theirs, ye, mine, tears, hitherto, yours, whereof, wh, wedg''d, waken''d, thereabou, s, myself, lye, discover''d, cha, bruis''d, beforethey, bedew''d

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, little, same, many, great, small, first, several, such, more, whole, certain, lower, upper, inner, thick, proper, own, most, thin, strong, common, large, much, cold, greater, thicker, sharp, apparent, white, good, hard, second, long, few, true, hot, new, like, third, less, next, peculiar, full, various, right, able, conspicuous, lesser, extraordinary

not, so, more, also, very, then, only, sometimes, together, forth, therefore, out, most, up, as, much, now, never, again, hence, well, somewhat, thus, first, yet, easily, presently, less, afterwards, too, there, away, however, partly, especially, off, rather, down, moreover, here, hardly, else, often, all, nevertheless, before, therein, altogether, sufficiently, far

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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