Distant Reader - subject-suicide-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 177,299 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 25,328 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:

may, man, life, law, self, will, one, nature, god, yet, reason, death, much, men, must, good, though, therefore, us, great, many, first, end, shall, place, sect, act, de, murther, might, made, thing, another, case, without, now, every, humane, body, ever, liberty, also, well, others, time, make, way, particular, never, himselfe

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are An essay concerning self-murther wherein is endeavour''d to prove that it is unlawful according to natural principles : with some considerations upon what is pretended from the said principles, by the author of a treatise intituled, Biathanatos, and others / by J. Adams ..., Biathanatos a declaration of that paradoxe or thesis, that selfe-homicide is not so naturally sinne, that it may never be otherwise : wherein the nature and the extent of all those lawes, which seeme to be violated by this act, are diligently surveyed / written by Iohn Donne ..., and A discourse of self-murder lately written, and now published as a disswasive from so horrid and inglorious a thing. By E.P., in a letter to his intimate friend R.F. Licens''d, November 24. 1691..

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

humane life, man may, early english, english books, saint augustine, let us, extreme pain, absolute propriety, humane nature, books online, every one, civil society, kill himselfe, humane laws, every man, ones self, canon law, tells us, must needs, right reason, page images, creation partnership, early works, text creation, true end, many others, good man, preserve life, one another, follow nature, another place, publick good, naturall law, wee may, great man, wise man, first part, good men, common opinion, natural principles, god gives, may bee, humane actions, may give, may doe, every thing, first place, natural law, present case, seems good

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The vvitty rogue arraigned, condemned, & executed. Or, The history of that incomparable thief Richard Hainam. Relating the several robberies, mad pranks, and handsome jests by him performed, as it was taken from his own mouth, not long before his death. Likewise the manner of robbing the King of Denmark, the King of France, the Duke of Normandy, the merchant at Rotterdam, cum multis aliis. Also, with his confession, concerning his robbing of the King of Scots. Together with his speech at the place of execution. / Published by E.S. for information & satisfaction of the people. A nevv poem on the dreadful death of the Earl of Essex who cut his own throat in the Tower. By the Embroyan-fancy of anti-Jack Presbyter., and The speech and confession of Mr. Richard Hannam on Tuesday last in the rounds of Smithfield, being the 17. of this instant June immediately before his great and fatall leap from off the ladder together with a true and perfect description of his life and death; his several rambles, figaries, exploits, and designs, performed in most parts of Europe; especially upon the king of Scots, the queen of Sweden, the kings of France, Spain, and Denmark, the high and mighty States of Holland, the great Turk, and the pope of Rome. This is licensed and entred, according to speciall order and command..

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, nature, law, self, reason, man, life, god, men, laws, case, world, thing, table, state, soul, selfe, sect, scripture, saint, richard, religion, publick, propriety, power, place, people, paul, pain, natural, merchant, master, martyrdome, martyr, liberty, lawes, jewels, jack, honour, hierome, hannam, hainam, gods, gentleman, fathers, end, distinction, devill, death, courage

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 man, and The speech and confession of Mr. Richard Hannam on Tuesday last in the rounds of Smithfield, being the 17. of this instant June immediately before his great and fatall leap from off the ladder together with a true and perfect description of his life and death; his several rambles, figaries, exploits, and designs, performed in most parts of Europe; especially upon the king of Scots, the queen of Sweden, the kings of France, Spain, and Denmark, the high and mighty States of Holland, the great Turk, and the pope of Rome. This is licensed and entred, according to speciall order and command. 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?":

man, life, self, death, reason, nature, end, men, t, place, thing, others, time, law, way, body, things, nothing, case, part, opinion, one, cases, purpose, act, p., sinne, selves, person, manner, use, sect, reasons, cap, people, preservation, wou''d, text, mind, selfe, power, none, argument, account, occasion, himselfe, words, author, places, fact

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, was, are, have, were, had, being, has, been, do, did, made, said, make, say, having, done, kill, give, let, does, take, given, see, consider, according, come, says, doing, suppose, follow, put, am, found, think, bound, destroy, concerning, seems, brought, thought, taken, prove, leave, gives, doe, makes, live, know

Proper Nouns

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

god, 〉, ◊, 〈, law, man, nature, life, de, murther, l., self, liberty, c., sect, humane, ●, hainam, reason, men, honour, s., lib, chap, laws, publick, saint, virtue, courage, state, christ, act, tcp, doe, pain, c, wee, world, q., power, hath, church, b, gods, justice, case, soul, augustine, romans, propriety

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, he, his, i, they, him, their, we, our, them, himself, us, you, my, themselves, me, her, its, your, she, ''em, thy, one, theirs, thee, em, us''d, shou''d, ours, mine, itself, herself, hers, †, pe, non, kn, ian, hee, f, e, consc''ence, ''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?"

other, such, great, many, own, same, good, much, first, more, particular, true, last, common, necessary, greatest, greater, natural, several, little, most, best, next, humane, present, better, evil, least, very, second, free, whole, proper, extreme, himselfe, guilty, certain, lawful, ill, new, early, absolute, sufficient, lawfull, general, worse, right, unlawful, reasonable, naturall

not, so, then, therefore, more, as, only, very, now, much, yet, ever, also, thus, most, well, never, out, here, onely, up, rather, too, even, away, naturally, first, often, just, always, indeed, there, otherwise, again, far, especially, in, before, else, all, afterwards, off, certainly, still, long, †, sometimes, no, thereof, once

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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