Distant Reader - subject-westminsterLondonEngland-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 8 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 170,355 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 21,294 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 86. 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:

london, church, called, street, one, city, lane, st, house, king, first, now, time, great, year, ward, side, also, henry, fol, court, west, made, lord, thereof, parish, many, edward, hall, two, place, old, east, end, john, houses, may, north, mayor, fair, kings, sir, part, builded, south, divers, saint, within, england, whereof

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Londinopolis, an historicall discourse or perlustration of the city of London, the imperial chamber, and chief emporium of Great Britain whereunto is added another of the city of Westminster, with the courts of justice, antiquities, and new buildings thereunto belonging / by Jam Howel, Esq., The dead tearme. Or, VVestminsters complaint for long vacations and short termes Written in manner of a dialogue betweene the two cityes London and Westminster. The contentes of this discourse is in the page following. By T. Dekker., and A True bill of the whole number that hath died in the cittie of London, the citty of Westminster, the citty of Norwich, and diuers other places, since the time this last sicknes of the plague began in either of them, to this present month of October the sixt day, 1603 with a relation of many visitations by the plague, in sundry other forraine countries..

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

parish church, lord mayor, old time, north side, south side, king henry, west side, east side, king edward, sir john, west end, pauls church, fair houses, sir thomas, side thereof, street ward, east end, new builded, english books, early english, high street, north end, now called, common law, queen elizabeth, divers fair, holy trinity, books online, south end, thames street, saint mary, kings bench, letters patents, commonly called, end thereof, lord maior, chief justice, riders street, king james, called st, long time, early works, will now, one hundred, great britain, baynards castle, great house, one thousand, owner thereof, fair church

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Die Mercurii 22. Julii 1646. Whereas divers malignants and others that have adhered to the King against the Parliament, are now come to the Cities of London and Westminster, and other places within the Parliaments quarters: ... Die Lunæ, 8. Junii. 1646. It is this day ordered by the Commons now assembled in Parliament, that on the next Lords day the respective ministers of the severall churches, and chappels within the cities of London and Westminster, ..., and Thursday the 17th of July, 1651 Resolved by the Parliament, that the fair usually held and kept yearly at James''s, within the liberty of the city of Westminster, on or about the twenty fifth day of July, be forborn this year; ....

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:

parliament, tcp, london, law, king, england, william, westminster, west, ward, wall, tower, thée, thy, thou, thomas, thames, street, st., south, sir, sheriffs, saint, river, richard, reign, queen, princes, plague, pen, parish, office, north, mayor, mary, majesty, lord, lane, land, knight, john, house, hospital, henry, haue, hall, gate, edward, east, crosse

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 london, and Die Veneris, 28 August. 1646. Ordered by the Lords and Commons assembled in Parliament, that Tuesday, being the eight day of September, now next coming, be set a part for a day of publike thanksgiving within the Cities of London and Westminster, ... 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, street, year, side, place, end, part, divers, name, men, houses, day, house, kings, others, years, number, hath, water, man, people, times, ground, lane, text, places, way, arms, work, plague, church, body, yard, things, pounds, stone, foot, thence, sides, pence, persons, length, shillings, manner, building, corner, hand, t, buildings, head

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, is, be, were, called, are, said, have, had, being, made, builded, did, gave, do, been, make, taken, having, buried, kept, came, granted, come, used, take, set, founded, hath, built, read, given, found, touching, brought, belonging, go, stood, sold, runneth, according, erected, done, inquire, incorporated, appointed, say, named, took, confirmed

Proper Nouns

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

london, church, st., city, lane, king, house, ward, henry, fol, court, lord, edward, parish, west, hall, john, east, mayor, north, sir, saint, england, street, tower, thames, south, hath, bridge, parliament, westminster, c., reign, mary, richard, thomas, william, river, pauls, law, whereof, bin, thou, queen, bishop, company, maior, aldermen, earl, inne

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, he, her, them, i, my, him, we, she, our, me, thy, you, himself, themselves, us, your, its, one, mine, ye, thee, us''d, theirs, whosoever, vp, ours, iu, 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, first, same, many, old, fair, such, third, new, large, common, more, second, ancient, sixth, much, high, good, next, poor, fourth, whole, late, long, little, certain, small, own, chief, last, most, eighth, full, free, former, worthy, true, rich, proper, principal, present, noble, famous, twentieth, south, several, greatest, early, strong

then, so, not, now, there, also, thereof, up, down, more, first, as, well, therefore, most, very, out, sometime, thus, before, only, again, over, sometimes, afterwards, here, far, yet, much, ever, long, in, commonly, lately, together, almost, still, about, never, otherwise, namely, after, appeareth, therein, rather, off, moreover, next, likewise, forth

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.