Distant Reader - subject-westminsterAssembly-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 23 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,024,097 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 44,525 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 89. 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:

god, will, us, christ, may, sin, shall, one, church, yet, man, doth, lord, love, gods, many, men, must, heaven, make, grace, first, word, good, faith, things, heart, now, churches, way, power, made, let, glory, much, great, spirit, like, kingdom, holy, come, day, without, give, psal, life, though, take, soul, father

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are A body of practical divinity consisting of above one hundred seventy six sermons on the lesser catechism composed by the reverend assembly of divines at Westminster : with a supplement of some sermons on several texts of Scripture / by Thomas Watson ..., An exposition of the assemblies catechism with practical inferences from each question as it was carried on in the Lords Days exercises in Dartmouth, in the first year of liberty, 1688 / by John Flavell., and An explicatory catechism: or, An explanation of the assemblies shorter catechism Wherein those principles are enlarged upon especially, which obviate the great and growing errors of Popery; useful for those families that desire to hold fast the form of sound words..

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

let us, god will, roman non, holy ghost, reformed churches, gods will, gods name, make us, jesus christ, take heed, every one, give us, new creature, must needs, god doth, iesus christ, will make, take away, english books, will give, early english, doth god, moral law, presbyteriall government, love god, lords supper, man may, glorifie god, right hand, new testament, original sin, god may, two things, books online, shall see, may see, may make, true god, ye shall, daily bread, lord iesus, every man, heavenly kingdom, shall never, will never, deliver us, may say, taken away, gods children, humane nature

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are A modell of the government of the church under the gospel, by presbyters, proved out of the holy scriptures, to be that one, onely uniform government of the universall visible church, and of all nationall, provinciall, classicall and congregationall churches: which is according to the will and appointment of Jesus Christ. Which may serve to stay such as are doubting, with hope of full satisfaction, and clear demonstration of this truth, shortly to be made by the reverend Assembly of Divines. / Composed by a Presbyterian minister of the city of London, and approved by divers of his learned brethren, and at their request published. The divine right of Presbyterie, asserted by the present Assembly, and petitioned for accordingly to the Honourable House of Commons in Parliament. With reasons discussing this pretended divine right; and yet with tendernesse to the brethren of the Presbyterial way. Pleading for a liberty of conscience for them in this their opinion, as for others of their dissenting brethren, and equally for both. With inferences upon their late petition. / By John Saltmarsh, preacher of the gospel., and Adoniram Byfeild of the last edition. Or, An expostulation with him concerning the book by him lately published, entituled, The reasons presented by the dissenting brethren, &c. But chiefly touching his lame and imperfect narrative of the proceedings of the Committe [sic] for Accomodation at Westminster concerning religion..

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:

church, lord, god, parliament, christ, assembly, spirit, covenant, law, cor, churches, roman, psal, prayer, people, father, commandment, word, tcp, soul, sin, scriptures, scripture, sabbath, rom, reformation, minister, matth, magistrate, kingdome, king, government, faith, england, elders, directory, congregations, committee, christian, apostles, acts, wrath, world, work, truth, tongue, toleration, temptation, synod, sun

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 god, and A view of the nevv directorie and a vindication of the ancient liturgie of the Church of England in answer to the reasons pretended in the ordinance and preface, for the abolishing the one, and establishing the other. 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?":

sin, things, man, men, way, heart, hath, power, others, day, people, faith, sins, glory, thing, time, name, death, love, doth, life, churches, selves, word, t, grace, part, words, nothing, body, work, prayer, blood, scripture, truth, saints, children, hearts, reason, gods, hand, government, end, religion, soul, self, ▪, place, light, peace

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, are, have, was, do, were, had, make, did, made, let, being, come, give, take, been, say, see, hath, set, said, know, pray, put, go, makes, done, called, doth, keep, given, love, having, am, bring, according, think, ''s, brought, believe, live, taken, comes, gives, came, hold, lay, receive, hear

Proper Nouns

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

god, christ, a., 〉, ◊, 〈, q., lord, church, heaven, thou, gods, hath, spirit, kingdom, father, grace, word, c., psal, churches, covenant, cor, world, faith, ye, soul, satan, quest, law, man, holy, rom, mercy, love, prayer, angels, sin, assembly, devil, sabbath, christian, glory, son, christs, king, resp, hell, mr, iohn

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, we, they, you, our, their, them, i, us, him, your, my, me, thy, himself, themselves, her, thee, its, she, one, ye, ours, yours, theirs, mine, ourselves, itself, vvhat, u, myself, s, whosoever, thou, o, non, herself, elias, whereof, ''s, ●, yourself, ws, whence, vvith, vbi, ts, trodden

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?"

many, other, such, own, great, good, more, first, much, true, non, holy, full, same, -, second, new, whole, roman, doth, little, last, particular, better, able, best, greater, common, third, sweet, high, perfect, least, present, saith, right, free, wise, sure, old, glorious, wicked, dead, most, necessary, false, former, vain, ready, worse

not, so, then, up, now, only, more, out, therefore, as, never, here, yet, away, well, also, ever, thus, most, first, much, forth, off, there, down, too, in, together, even, very, rather, long, still, hence, all, else, again, no, especially, once, over, sometimes, far, secondly, that, just, is, indeed, namely, enough

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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