Distant Reader - subject-wool-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 27 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 182,349 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 6,753 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:

will, shall, may, trade, great, england, wool, one, english, much, time, made, text, tcp, manufacture, us, now, every, make, wooll, nation, persons, many, act, must, good, king, people, first, thousand, cloth, eebo, thomas, interest, year, also, woollen, sir, yet, kingdom, ireland, aforesaid, majesty, county, manufactures, hundred, two, parts, mr, merchants

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Anno Regni Caroli II. Regis Angliæ, Scotiæ, Franciæ, & Hiberniæ, duodecimo. At the Parliament begun at Westminster, the five and twentieth day of April, an. Dom. 1660 In the twelfth year of the reign of our most gracious soveraign lord Charles, by the grace of God, of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, &c., The merchants remonstrance published in the time of the late warre, revived and inlarged : wherein is set forth the inevitable miseries which may suddenly befall this kingdome by want of trade and decay of manufactures : with copy of a letter to the Kings Majestie presented unto him at Hampton Court, October 30, 1647 : shewing, 1, the want of such a due regard as was fit for the preservation of trade in the time of the late warre, 2, some of the bad effects it hath since produced, 3, the offer of the authors opinion what may best bee done for remedy : also, a letter to the Right Honourable the two Houses of Parliament, to the army under the command of His Excellency Sir Tho. Fairfax, and to the rest of His Majesties subjects in generall : whereunto is annexed a discourse of the excellencie of wooll, manifested by the improvement in its manufactures, and the great good thence arising before the late warre / by John Battie ..., and The proverb crossed, or, A new paradox maintained (viz.) that it is not at all times true, that interest cannot lye being a full, clear and distinct answer to a paper of an English gentleman, who endeavours to demonstrate that it is for the interest of England that the laws against transportation of wooll should be repealed..

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

english books, early english, books online, creation partnership, text creation, woollen manufacture, page images, one thousand, six hundred, thousand pounds, thousand six, woollen manufactures, excellent majesty, image sets, represented either, tcp schema, characters represented, per annum, hundred thousand, authority aforesaid, early works, native commodities, will never, great britain, sir william, french king, one hundred, batch review, tiff page, encoded text, image set, images scanned, creative commons, asking permission, work described, proquest page, iv tiff, financial support, institutions providing, xml conversion, encoded edition, pfs batch, online text, commercial purposes, markup reviewed, text transcribed, wool industry, without asking, tcp assigned, bit group

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The proposals for promoting the woollen-manufactory, promoted Further making it appear, that the nation will thereby increase in wealth, at least 5000 l. per day, for every day in the year on which it is lawful to labour. And that the strength and safety of the king and kingdom, together with a most happy reformation will be accomplished therein. All which is most plainly demonstrated, by several well-wisheres thereunto, inhabitants and citizens of London. Licensed, April 29. 1679. Ro. L''Estrange. Reasons humbly offered for encouraging His Majesties natural born subjects to export the woollen manufactures of this realm to Germany, and Reasons humbly offered by the governour, assistants, and fellowship of Eastland-Merchants against the giving of a general liberty to all persons whatsoever to export the English vvoollen-manufacture whither they please..

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, trade, nation, english, england, wooll, wool, manufacture, majesty, cloth, interest, opponent, merchants, majesties, kingdome, kingdom, king, ireland, french, yarn, wyer, woolls, william, wealth, war, town, thomas, stuffs, sir, shipps, price, people, mr., manufactures, majestie, lord, land, john, james, iohn, houses, gent, france, expedients, esq, early, earl, draperies, county, country

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 shall, and An essay on wool and wollen manufacture for the improvement of trade, to the benefit of landlords, feeders of sheep, clothiers, and merchands, in a letter to a member of Parliament. 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, people, persons, wooll, day, nation, interest, year, person, reason, hath, parts, part, texts, years, money, work, trade, wool, price, thing, men, characters, works, way, t, commodities, others, pounds, books, xml, images, things, advantage, image, page, want, places, self, times, subjects, nothing, use, l., edition, project, keying, eebo, country

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, have, are, was, said, were, been, made, being, make, do, had, take, did, aforesaid, encoded, put, give, come, exported, done, brought, sent, say, having, enacted, according, prevent, given, taken, let, based, appear, sold, provided, paid, set, lost, sell, bring, mentioned, buy, think, published, found, making, appointed, keep, hath

Proper Nouns

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

england, trade, wool, tcp, english, manufacture, act, king, cloth, thomas, ireland, sir, majesty, kingdom, county, mr., william, iohn, john, france, parliament, majesties, woollen, hath, merchants, manufactures, city, text, tei, eebo, nation, oxford, london, law, lord, esq, gent, henry, wooll, c., sea, clothiers, edward, opponent, exportation, town, company, richard, kingdome, god

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, our, their, they, his, i, we, them, he, us, my, your, themselves, him, you, its, her, me, himself, she, ours, thy, thee, theirs, ''s, mine, us''d, ''em, one, l, yours, whereof, vvhat, unconcern''d, thou, ourselves, hiasself

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, great, same, many, own, more, good, much, several, english, true, early, first, general, late, greater, whole, present, little, most, able, former, due, french, available, better, small, least, last, like, respective, fit, less, few, poor, aforesaid, greatest, best, very, short, new, large, illegible, clear, next, full, worth, sufficient, possible

not, so, then, now, as, more, only, also, much, very, up, therefore, most, here, well, thereof, out, there, first, in, never, abroad, whatsoever, before, humbly, further, even, formerly, yet, therein, too, together, over, far, thereby, ever, consequently, online, hereby, especially, still, rather, about, otherwise, onely, again, thus, away, yearly, always

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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