Distant Reader - subject-universityOfCambridge-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 14 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 144,234 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 10,302 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 85. 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:

master, house, one, church, god, now, will, made, yet, great, good, man, two, king, much, men, text, might, first, though, time, colledge, many, place, sir, make, shall, may, without, cambridge, university, us, like, people, lord, away, came, iohn, owne, take, london, parliament, tcp, put, come, castle, kings, himselfe, therefore, doctor

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Angliæ ruina: or, Englands ruine represented in the barbarous, and sacrilegious outrages of the sectaries of this kingdome, committed upon the lives, consciences and estates of all His Maj: loyal subjects in generall; but more particularly upon the churches, colledges, clergie, and scholars of the same. Containing two briefe catalogues of such heads and fellowes of colledges in the University of Cambridge, and other learned and pious divines, within the city of London, as have been ejected, plundered, imprisoned, or banished, for their constancie in the Protestant religion, and loyalty to their soveraigne. Whereunto is added, a chronologie of the time and place of all the battails, sieges, conflicts, and other remarkable passages which have happened betwixt His Majesty and the Parliament; with a catalogue of such persons of quality, as have been slain on either party, from Novemb. 3. 1640 till the 25. of March, 1647., Querela Cantabrigiensis, or, A remonstrance by way of apologie for the banished members of the late flourishing University of Cambridge by some of the said sufferers., and The foundation of the universitie of Cambridge, vvith a catalogue of the principall founders and speciall benefactours of all the colledges, and totall number of students, magistrates and officers therein being, anno 1634..

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

early english, english books, books online, king henry, text creation, creation partnership, page images, mercurius rusticus, besides officers, sir william, master chestlen, early works, late fellow, whole number, six pence, take away, king edward, next day, hundred pounds, one master, thousand pounds, price six, protestant religion, master yeomans, creative commons, iv tiff, now master, tcp assigned, characters represented, image set, financial support, next morning, textual changes, proquest page, images scanned, represented either, markup reviewed, obtained licence, online text, encoded text, tiff page, pfs batch, encoded edition, xml conversion, bit group, tcp schema, image sets, commercial purposes, text transcribed, asking permission

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Orders to be observ''d by all students in the University at the approach and during the continuance of their Majesties here, upon the utmost penalty of the statutes to be inflicted upon the transgressors, as the disobedience and insolence of the offenders shall merit. The foundation of the universitie of Cambridge, vvith a catalogue of the principall founders and speciall benefactours of all the colledges, and totall number of students, magistrates and officers therein being, anno 1634., and Angliæ ruina: or, Englands ruine represented in the barbarous, and sacrilegious outrages of the sectaries of this kingdome, committed upon the lives, consciences and estates of all His Maj: loyal subjects in generall; but more particularly upon the churches, colledges, clergie, and scholars of the same. Containing two briefe catalogues of such heads and fellowes of colledges in the University of Cambridge, and other learned and pious divines, within the city of London, as have been ejected, plundered, imprisoned, or banished, for their constancie in the Protestant religion, and loyalty to their soveraigne. Whereunto is added, a chronologie of the time and place of all the battails, sieges, conflicts, and other remarkable passages which have happened betwixt His Majesty and the Parliament; with a catalogue of such persons of quality, as have been slain on either party, from Novemb. 3. 1640 till the 25. of March, 1647..

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, master, university, house, colledge, cambridge, religion, lord, king, fellows, doctor, country, church, yeomans, william, warrant, towne, town, souldiers, sir, sequestred, rebels, rebellion, prisoners, prayer, plunder, parsons, parliament, old, mr., ministers, minister, major, majesties, london, library, learning, law, lady, knight, kingdome, justice, john, iohn, god, fair, earle, doct, covenant, company

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 master, and A brief answer unto the Cambridge moddel which is to go to the two universities to be read by all the doctors and students, vice-chancellor, and fellows, as they will answer it to God : and likewise this is to go to all those they call gentlemen to the countreys to whom this moddel is directed, from the doctors, for money to maintaine the students : and is to go amongst all the priests that are, and have been heretofore made ministers by the same doctors of colledges, now planted themselves in the countreys, and this is to go amongst all the country-men, that they may see the fruits of the learning from the doctors, which fruits is persecution ... / by E.M. 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?":

house, man, time, men, place, text, people, hands, others, day, name, way, students, rest, world, hand, servants, foundation, end, books, nothing, blood, pounds, part, number, thing, power, death, money, kings, wife, owne, work, houses, scholars, life, fellows, children, t, reason, goods, places, order, himselfe, things, body, night, condition, texts, religion

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, be, is, had, were, have, being, are, made, did, been, having, make, came, take, put, come, give, given, said, see, called, brought, set, left, sent, done, gave, taken, found, according, let, know, call, find, do, lay, committed, read, leave, founded, encoded, carry, thought, took, plundered, used, bring, published, kept

Proper Nouns

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

master, church, m., god, colledge, s., king, ●, sir, house, cambridge, university, lord, iohn, d., london, parliament, c., tcp, castle, john, doctor, william, christ, rebels, rebells, sequestred, towne, thomas, henry, hath, england, citie, bishop, doct, colonel, robert, oxford, 〉, commons, wee, law, ◊, english, hall, earle, lady, mr., edward, doe

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, it, he, him, them, our, her, you, i, we, your, us, she, themselves, my, me, its, thy, himself, ''em, thee, theirs, wellingborow, one, em, ye, ours, wedg''d, tears, herself, hers

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, great, same, good, many, such, first, much, last, own, whole, old, more, late, early, little, true, next, dead, new, present, most, english, able, like, barbarous, common, high, better, honourable, small, second, former, famous, very, poor, open, holy, full, sad, long, ancient, available, ready, due, least, young, large, honest, third

not, so, then, up, now, out, there, away, as, most, very, more, therefore, much, thus, onely, yet, here, in, first, ever, never, well, even, together, too, only, down, off, thereof, presently, also, on, long, forth, over, before, almost, indeed, afterwards, no, enough, often, online, especially, all, instantly, rather, formerly, early

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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