subject-sovietUnion-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 5 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 138,338 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 27,667 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.

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histogram of sizes
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box plot of sizes

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 92. 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.

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histogram of readability
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box plot of readability

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:

great, emperour, one, many, time, like, made, now, much, two, people, man, first, may, countrey, also, will, men, within, yet, english, prince, without, manner, good, well, sent, emperours, every, make, russe, king, called, church, day, onely, chap, russia, place, house, year, long, god, haue, set, came, state, though, come, part

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The history of Russia, or, The government of the Emperour of Muscovia with the manners & fashions of the people of that countrey / by G. Fletcher, sometime fellow of Kings Colledge in Cambridge and employed in the embassie thither., A brief history of Moscovia and of other less-known countries lying eastward of Russia as far as Cathay, gather''d from the writings of several eye-witnesses / by John Milton., and Sir Thomas Smithes voiage and entertainment in Rushia With the tragicall ends of two emperors, and one empresse, within one moneth during his being there: and the miraculous preseruation of the now raigning emperor, esteemed dead for 18. yeares..

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

english books, early english, every year, every man, short time, great duke, books online, juan vasilowich, many times, saint nicholas, whole countrey, page images, creation partnership, text creation, sir thomas, years since, greek church, chrim tartar, two hundred, la vile, emperour demetrius, thousand men, holy water, russe emperour, great store, next day, tcp schema, image sets, may seem, many years, kings gentlemen, late emperour, characters represented, last year, represented either, bulsha prechod, emperours treasurie, king charles, one another, shall see, years old, young prince, might haue, may appear, nothing else, kings gent, within one, russe people, emperour juan, holy ghost

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Newes of the present miseries of Rushia occasioned by the late warre in that countrey. Commenced betweene Sigimond now King of Poland. Charles late King of Swethland. Demetrius, the last of the name, Emperour of Rushia. Together with the memorable occurrences of our owne nationall forces, English, and Scottes, vnder the pay of the now King of Swethland. A brief history of Moscovia and of other less-known countries lying eastward of Russia as far as Cathay, gather''d from the writings of several eye-witnesses / by John Milton., and The history of Russia, or, The government of the Emperour of Muscovia with the manners & fashions of the people of that countrey / by G. Fletcher, sometime fellow of Kings Colledge in Cambridge and employed in the embassie thither..

While often deemed superficial or sophomoric, rudimentary frequencies and their associated "word clouds" can be quite insightful:

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unigrams
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bigrams

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, emperour, english, russian, prince, lord, king, church, chap, wife, vansusce, turk, tartar, syberia, son, sea, russia, russes, russe, rushia, river, realm, provinces, priest, prestaues, poles, poland, people, patriarch, nobility, nobilitie, muscouite, mosko, mosco, majesty, maister, kings, juan, greek, great, god, gent, fish, father, england, empire, emperor, dukes, duke, demetrius

And now word clouds really begin to shine:

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keywords

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 A brief history of Moscovia and of other less-known countries lying eastward of Russia as far as Cathay, gather''d from the writings of several eye-witnesses / by John Milton. 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:

  1. great - The history of Russia, or, The government of the Emperour of Muscovia with the manners & fashions of the people of that countrey / by G. Fletcher, sometime fellow of Kings Colledge in Cambridge and employed in the embassie thither.
  2. great - Sir Thomas Smithes voiage and entertainment in Rushia With the tragicall ends of two emperors, and one empresse, within one moneth during his being there: and the miraculous preseruation of the now raigning emperor, esteemed dead for 18. yeares.
  3. emperour - A brief history of Moscovia and of other less-known countries lying eastward of Russia as far as Cathay, gather''d from the writings of several eye-witnesses / by John Milton.

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:

  1. great, emperour, time - The history of Russia, or, The government of the Emperour of Muscovia with the manners & fashions of the people of that countrey / by G. Fletcher, sometime fellow of Kings Colledge in Cambridge and employed in the embassie thither.
  2. great, prince, time - Sir Thomas Smithes voiage and entertainment in Rushia With the tragicall ends of two emperors, and one empresse, within one moneth during his being there: and the miraculous preseruation of the now raigning emperor, esteemed dead for 18. yeares.
  3. emperour, great, sent - A brief history of Moscovia and of other less-known countries lying eastward of Russia as far as Cathay, gather''d from the writings of several eye-witnesses / by John Milton.
  4. telling, bids, scarce - A brief history of Moscovia and of other less-known countries lying eastward of Russia as far as Cathay, gather''d from the writings of several eye-witnesses / by John Milton.
  5. telling, bids, scarce - A brief history of Moscovia and of other less-known countries lying eastward of Russia as far as Cathay, gather''d from the writings of several eye-witnesses / by John Milton.

Moreover, the totality of the study carrel's aboutness, can be visualized with the following pie chart:

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topic model

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, people, man, manner, men, day, place, part, year, countrey, name, house, rest, way, years, side, parts, state, death, rubbels, number, times, life, hand, reason, others, head, none, night, matter, office, horse, end, nothing, purpose, order, service, world, water, towns, gold, houses, foure, daies, hath, places, ground, cause, wife, t

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, was, are, be, have, being, were, had, made, sent, make, called, came, come, do, brought, did, set, been, done, say, said, call, take, put, found, having, hauing, see, go, taken, kept, hath, use, has, held, thought, keep, know, give, left, carried, eat, concerning, appointed, knew, bring, read, hold, haue

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nouns
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verbs

Proper Nouns

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

emperour, prince, emperours, russe, russia, chap, god, king, english, church, 〉, mosco, ●, ◊, lord, c., mosko, court, 〈, princes, countrey, demetrius, tcp, poland, haue, duke, tartar, ambassadour, poles, russians, hath, england, czar, boris, patriarch, emperor, sea, whereof, nobilitie, castle, vansusce, ambas, tartars, sir, father, ambassador, owne, rushia, juan, city

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, they, their, he, it, them, him, i, our, her, we, you, themselves, himself, my, she, your, me, thy, us, its, thee, vp, herself, theirs, mine, vnto, ours, one, З, ya, us''d, l, hers

Below are words cloud of your study carrel's proper & personal pronouns.

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proper nouns
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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, good, own, more, much, whole, same, first, certain, little, most, best, last, chief, small, common, present, long, few, new, old, rich, high, full, english, true, late, large, young, better, second, greater, short, next, fair, dead, strange, very, least, noble, third, several, greatest, right, publick, ordinary, white

not, so, then, very, now, also, as, well, there, more, onely, thus, up, out, much, first, before, together, in, yet, down, rather, most, commonly, away, therefore, off, again, long, here, about, sometimes, never, all, still, presently, once, indeed, likewise, on, else, ever, too, specially, especially, somewhat, otherwise, often, far, thereof

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adjectives
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adverbs

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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