Distant Reader - subject-vagrancy-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 6 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 17,514 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 2,919 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 81. 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:

poor, shall, work, text, city, tcp, may, will, english, within, persons, made, many, eebo, london, great, good, early, time, one, corporation, oxford, books, tei, laws, doe, give, stock, texts, well, aforesaid, encoded, first, others, england, thereof, houses, might, now, online, house, also, set, phase, given, characters, xml, law, works, every

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The poor mans friend, or A narrative of what progresse many worthy citi- [sic] of London have made in that godly work of providing for the poor With an Ordinance of Parliament for the better carrying on of the work. Published for the information and encouragement of those, both in city and countrey, that wish well to so pious a work., By the King, a proclamation for the due observation of certain statutes made for the suppressing of rogues, vagabonds, beggers, and other idle disorderly persons and for relief of the poore., and By the King. A proclamation for the ease of the citty of Oxford, and suburbs, and of the county of Oxford, of unnecessary persons lodging or abiding there.

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

early english, english books, books online, text creation, creation partnership, page images, tcp schema, idle persons, characters represented, image sets, represented either, early works, common councell, liberties thereof, persons lodging, creative commons, authority aforesaid, xml conversion, tiff page, providing financial, mona logarbo, asking permission, encoded text, image set, pfs batch, batch review, without asking, tcp assigned, markup reviewed, institutions providing, financial support, images scanned, commercial purposes, poor mans, encoded edition, text transcribed, proquest page, work described, iv tiff, online text, bit group, anno dom, six hundred, spi global, godly work, progresse many, thousand six, good laws, disorderly persons, mans friend

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Act appointing the inhabitants within the city of Edinburgh to give up lists of all persons lodging within their houses ilk night By the mayor, to the alderman of the ward of [blank] whereas divers good laws have been made, and are still in force, for the suppressing and punishing of vagrants, vagabonds, and other idle persons ..., and Advertisement by the sheriff-deput of Aberdeen shire, undersubscryveing Whereas, by the foresaid proclamation, the Lords of their Majesties most honorable Privy Councill, doe strictly require and command obedience to the former proclamation and this, for setling of maintenance for the indigent and necessitous poor, and suppressing of vagabounds and sturdie beggers, ....

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, london, work, poor, oxford, majesty, kingdom, corporation, city, aberdeen

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 poor, and Advertisement by the sheriff-deput of Aberdeen shire, undersubscryveing Whereas, by the foresaid proclamation, the Lords of their Majesties most honorable Privy Councill, doe strictly require and command obedience to the former proclamation and this, for setling of maintenance for the indigent and necessitous poor, and suppressing of vagabounds and sturdie beggers, ... 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?":

work, text, time, persons, texts, others, books, xml, characters, works, image, houses, stock, images, relief, page, man, end, way, power, house, execution, edition, day, purposes, purpose, keying, eebo, things, parts, laws, elements, reason, project, places, encoding, data, title, place, number, want, users, poverty, men, markup, good, children, being, account, years

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, said, have, are, was, were, made, been, being, give, encoded, given, set, make, according, had, appointed, put, did, aforesaid, take, having, provided, do, based, sent, published, providing, printed, go, -, ordained, done, work, thought, represented, known, require, performed, created, create, marked, maintain, found, desired, corrected, cause, use, meet

Proper Nouns

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

city, tcp, london, corporation, oxford, text, england, english, poor, tei, eebo, doe, president, god, law, kingdom, john, aldermen, proquest, phase, partnership, parliament, laws, creation, majesty, common, transcribed, persons, lord, wing, liberties, edinburgh, online, mr, lords, king, county, commons, aberdeen, parishes, deputy, charles, ward, wales, utf-8, unicode, parish, p5, officers, ncbel

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?"

their, his, they, it, them, our, he, you, i, we, her, your, him, us, themselves, she, my, me, its, himself, thy, whereof, theirs

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?"

poor, such, other, many, great, same, early, good, english, own, idle, better, due, available, like, able, necessary, first, present, fit, true, several, much, more, constable, textual, severall, sad, pious, illegible, general, sufficient, second, further, worthy, whole, sick, original, necessitous, keyboarded, indigent, honourable, former, financial, disorderly, commercial, aforesaid, active, subject, possible

not, so, then, thereof, now, well, also, as, up, therefore, in, there, out, online, most, first, down, very, here, yet, thus, secondly, more, further, only, especially, truly, never, much, long, hereby, forth, formerly, even, early, away, above, thirdly, likewise, already, whatsoever, usually, still, over, on, off, fourthly, effectually, carefully, almost

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.