Distant Reader - subject-tariff-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 13 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 68,640 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 5,280 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 83. 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:

king, law, england, shall, parliament, merchandizes, may, text, impositions, kings, will, prerogative, tcp, time, edw, doth, one, english, made, first, trade, act, every, merchants, without, imposition, great, much, eebo, per, common, ireland, now, take, thereof, part, commodities, goods, within, taken, power, therefore, make, yet, books, set, early, people, customes, nations

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Jus imponendi vectigana, or, The learning touching customs, tonnage, poundage, and impositions on merchandizes, asserted as well from the rules of the common and civil law, as of generall reason and policy of state / by Sir John Davis ..., A plea for the bringing in of Irish cattel, and keeping out of fish caught by foreigners together with an humble address to the honourable members of Parliament of the countries of Cornwal and Devon, about the advancement of tin, fishery, and divers manufactures / by John Collins., and By the King, a proclamation for the putting in execution the laws and statutes of this realm, for the preventing the exportation of sheep, wooll, wooll-fells, woollen-yarn, mortlings, shorlings, wooll-stocks, fullers-earth, and fulling-clay out of this kingdom.

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

english books, early english, common law, books online, king edw, kings prerogative, creation partnership, text creation, per annum, page images, laying impositions, absolute power, law merchant, represented either, tcp schema, king doth, characters represented, image sets, demi mark, civil law, general court, queen mary, without act, duties payable, hundred weight, capital stock, per cent, pfs batch, images scanned, asking permission, encoded edition, tiff page, xml conversion, institutions providing, work described, markup reviewed, spi global, text transcribed, iv tiff, commercial purposes, image set, without asking, batch review, encoded text, online text, bit group, providing financial, proquest page, creative commons, financial support

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Act for a new imposition upon English commodities. At Edinburgh, the twenty one of August, one thousand six hundred and sixty three. A proclamation, imposing a further custom upon wines and tobacco, &c., and The case of Sir John Lambert, Bar. Samuel Shepheard, and John James David, merchants of London. Humbly offered to the consideration of this honourable house, for relief..

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, parliament, england, trade, act, wooll, vessel, text, provisions, princes, prerogative, nations, nation, merchants, merchandizes, majesty, lisence, law, land, king, john, ireland, impositions, hemp, governor, general, english, edw, early, deputy, custome, crown, company, city, bonds

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 king, and Jovis duodecimo die Maii 1698, annoque regni Regis Willielmi ... this day an order and report made by the Committee for Letting the Cities Lands, touching several duties taken by several officers and others at Billingsgate ... 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?":

time, text, kings, doth, part, l., power, goods, people, texts, money, impositions, year, day, reason, books, commodities, work, characters, shillings, xml, divers, years, others, duties, page, image, case, works, subjects, persons, images, value, pence, merchants, hath, use, pound, times, wooll, cases, title, keying, eebo, edition, chap, things, parliament, imposition, elements

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:

be, is, was, are, have, were, said, made, did, been, do, being, had, take, taken, make, set, granted, paid, pay, encoded, called, according, imported, given, give, exported, brought, laid, come, lay, find, based, sold, mentioned, having, laying, published, grant, represented, raised, done, bear, received, touching, printed, lost, following, known, created

Proper Nouns

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

king, england, law, merchandizes, parliament, prerogative, tcp, edw, act, trade, impositions, _, ireland, english, merchants, imposition, crown, rot, london, c., majesty, common, commons, text, customes, lord, nations, governor, land, hath, custome, tei, kings, eebo, court, company, deputy, charter, princes, ed, oxford, kingdom, council, john, mr., stock, sea, majesties, hemp, chap

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, his, their, they, our, we, he, i, them, him, my, us, himself, themselves, her, your, me, its, you, theirs, she, ours, whereof, whence, na, myself, mine, em

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, same, first, great, own, more, many, early, ancient, english, good, much, greater, payable, saith, like, new, absolute, general, common, available, several, due, most, certain, true, second, last, numb, large, little, sundry, subject, illegible, fit, whole, honourable, textual, late, best, poor, particular, worth, high, free, extraordinary, doth, better, small

not, so, now, thereof, therefore, as, then, well, only, also, more, again, there, out, never, first, much, in, ever, up, onely, most, yet, over, before, about, sometimes, here, online, far, very, especially, likewise, even, away, thus, namely, lastly, hence, above, hereafter, abroad, humbly, formerly, too, off, consequently, secondly, rather, usually

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.

Thank you for using the Distant Reader.