Distant Reader - subject-southwestOld-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:"Southwest, Old". 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 5 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 493,348 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 98,669 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 68. 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, great, men, will, man, every, new, state, two, time, country, now, many, first, made, people, north, like, years, carolina, long, life, old, little, day, young, river, may, land, never, city, mr, well, indians, south, general, white, without, mississippi, house, party, hundred, virginia, french, among, though, home, ever, much, found

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The Memories of Fifty Years Containing Brief Biographical Notices of Distinguished Americans, and Anecdotes of Remarkable Men; Interspersed with Scenes and Incidents Occurring during a Long Life of Observation Chiefly Spent in the Southwest, The Conquest of the Old Southwest; the romantic story of the early pioneers into Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, 1740-1790, and Pioneers of the Old Southwest: a chronicle of the dark and bloody ground.

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

north carolina, united states, new orleans, south carolina, one hundred, back country, every one, white man, daniel boone, general jackson, two hundred, years ago, young men, colonial records, richard henderson, judge henderson, transylvania company, carolina colonial, old southwest, new york, young man, fifty years, many years, supreme court, john sevier, short time, one occasion, white men, new england, two years, red men, thousand dollars, early life, one day, miss alice, red man, james robertson, hundred miles, hundred yards, five years, one side, five hundred, republican party, land company, two thousand, old man, every side, new country, patrick henry, great man

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The Conquest of the Old Southwest; the romantic story of the early pioneers into Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, 1740-1790 The Memories of Fifty Years Containing Brief Biographical Notices of Distinguished Americans, and Anecdotes of Remarkable Men; Interspersed with Scenes and Incidents Occurring during a Long Life of Observation Chiefly Spent in the Southwest, and Pioneers of the Old Southwest: a chronicle of the dark and bloody ground.

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:

man, virginia, river, orleans, new, mississippi, john, indians, house, governor, french, england, carolina, william, united, tennessee, street, state, st., south, sevier, page, north, natchez, louisiana, kentucky, james, great, english, daniel, country, city, cherokees, boone, american, ¬â¢, year, yankee, west, way, watauga, washington, valley, troup, transylvania, spanish, southern, slave, ship, senate

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 great, and The Memories of Fifty Years Containing Brief Biographical Notices of Distinguished Americans, and Anecdotes of Remarkable Men; Interspersed with Scenes and Incidents Occurring during a Long Life of Observation Chiefly Spent in the Southwest 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, great, time - The Memories of Fifty Years Containing Brief Biographical Notices of Distinguished Americans, and Anecdotes of Remarkable Men; Interspersed with Scenes and Incidents Occurring during a Long Life of Observation Chiefly Spent in the Southwest
new, city, like - The South-West, by a Yankee. In Two Volumes. Volume 2
carolina, north, virginia - The Conquest of the Old Southwest; the romantic story of the early pioneers into Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, 1740-1790
men, boone, sevier - Pioneers of the Old Southwest: a chronicle of the dark and bloody ground
improvised, apprehensions, happen - Pioneers of the Old Southwest: a chronicle of the dark and bloody ground

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?":

men, man, time, country, people, years, life, day, city, land, state, party, heart, way, river, character, nature, home, war, house, law, mind, miles, side, part, days, place, cotton, family, head, others, friends, slaves, water, children, one, power, year, society, hand, name, lands, government, feet, number, world, night, history, death, age

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, is, were, had, be, are, have, been, has, made, do, found, said, came, did, being, come, make, see, know, went, seen, am, known, left, take, passed, gave, go, knew, sent, called, give, met, brought, seemed, given, took, became, having, felt, become, held, formed, changed, received, set, heard, say, find

Proper Nouns

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

_, carolina, new, north, indians, state, mr., boone, mississippi, virginia, kentucky, john, |, orleans, natchez, governor, south, states, henderson, jackson, general, sevier, william, georgia, united, washington, tennessee, french, west, congress, james, england, river, colonel, crawford, county, louisiana, de, cherokees, daniel, george, fort, government, clay, great, transylvania, judge, �, ohio, company

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?"

his, he, it, their, they, i, him, them, its, we, her, you, my, our, me, she, us, himself, your, themselves, itself, myself, one, herself, thy, ourselves, em, mine, thee, yourself, theirs, yours, ''em, ''s, ours, hers, ya, newspapers--"the, yt, ye, wh, water--, thyself, there, thar, off.--(this, indifference;--they, i''m, frankland"--the, faubourg

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, few, little, young, first, old, more, same, own, such, white, new, good, long, large, public, indian, high, last, small, american, several, whole, french, early, much, full, southern, beautiful, most, black, wild, red, true, natural, political, general, peculiar, western, strong, present, only, common, fine, human, green, free, rich

not, so, now, more, very, only, as, up, here, most, then, never, out, well, ever, soon, away, too, down, always, there, again, almost, once, even, far, also, however, long, still, about, thus, much, first, often, off, perhaps, on, yet, nearly, immediately, back, just, generally, sometimes, in, rapidly, especially, all, already

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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