Distant Reader - subject-zoology-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 7 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 604,476 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 100,746 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 97. 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:

also, one, like, will, great, called, may, two, man, yet, much, little, water, time, take, first, many, long, make, men, body, therefore, made, place, doth, head, part, beast, saith, good, together, three, found, away, serpents, without, horse, colour, shall, taken, white, forth, another, pliny, nature, young, earth, come, flesh, black

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The history of four-footed beasts and serpents describing at large their true and lively figure, their several names, conditions, kinds, virtues ... countries of their breed, their love and hatred to mankind, and the wonderful work by Edward Topsell ; whereunto is now added, The theater of insects, or, Lesser living creatures ... by T. Muffet ..., The historie of serpents. Or, The second booke of liuing creatures wherein is contained their diuine, naturall, and morall descriptions, with their liuely figures, names, conditions, kindes and natures of all venemous beasts: with their seuerall poysons and antidotes; their deepe hatred to mankind, and the wonderfull worke of God in their creation, and destruction. Necessary and profitable to all sorts of men: collected out of diuine scriptures, fathers, phylosophers, physitians, and poets: amplified with sundry accidentall histories, hierogliphicks, epigrams, emblems, and ænigmaticall obseruations. By Edvvard Topsell., and A description of the nature of four-footed beasts with their figures en[graven in brass] / written in Latin by Dr. John Johnston ; translated into English by J.P..

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

young ones, many times, bring forth, whole body, every day, great deal, take away, every one, living creatures, one another, pliny saith, brought forth, come forth, inches long, right side, year old, foot long, winter time, shewed already, taken away, will make, drive away, ancient time, two inches, one part, several parts, one side, will never, long time, run away, footed beasts, penny weight, upper part, three dayes, shall suffice, one dram, young one, night time, herb called, cold water, wilde beasts, much like, two drams, two ounces, like manner, every year, left side, like sort, short time, warm water

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are A catalogue of all the cheifest rarities in the publick theater and Anatomie-Hall, of the University of Leyden, by Gerrard Blancken, which are so set in order that all may easily bee found in their places. Sic erimus cuncti postquam nos auferet oreus Memoir''s for a natural history of animals containing the anatomical descriptions of several creatures dissected by the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris / Englished by Alexander Pitfeild ... ; to which is added an account of the measure of a degree of a great circle of the earth, published by the same Academy and Englished by Richard Waller ..., and New-Englands rarities discovered in birds, beasts, fishes, serpents, and plants of that country : together with the physical and chyrurgical remedies wherewith the natives constantly use to cure their distempers, wounds, and sores : also a perfect description of an Indian squa ... with a poem not improperly conferr''d upon her : lastly, a chronological table of the most remarkable passages in that country amongst the English : illustrated with cuts / by John Josselyn, Gent..

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:

sea, tcp, head, wolf, pliny, lyon, long, like, king, horse, hee, hart, hare, god, fox, english, elephant, dog, crocodile, country, body, writers, wormes, world, winter, wine, water, vpon, vnto, viper, vineger, vessels, ventricle, vena, unicorn, tortoyce, torteyse, tongue, toade, time, tiger, theyr, tail, tab, swine, sunne, sun, substance, stellion, spyder

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 like, and The history of brutes, or, A description of living creatures wherein the nature and properties of four-footed beasts are at large described / by Wolfgangus Franzius ... ; and now rendred into English by N.W. 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?":

man, time, body, men, water, place, part, head, colour, flesh, skin, beast, parts, nature, eyes, earth, reason, feet, day, belly, things, teeth, manner, doth, mouth, others, hath, poyson, places, ones, beasts, side, horse, serpents, thing, hair, length, times, name, horses, creatures, meat, way, worms, nothing, horns, tail, sheep, one, wine

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, are, be, was, have, were, being, do, called, take, had, make, made, did, found, taken, come, say, said, call, put, let, hath, having, been, eat, see, set, give, according, seen, came, brought, go, live, use, cast, grow, drink, given, lay, fall, kill, know, bring, mingled, bred, cut, observed, has

Proper Nouns

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

〉, 〈, ◊, pliny, serpent, hath, c., sea, kinde, l., serpents, god, horse, beast, dog, ●, aristotle, oyl, wilde, wine, dogs, whereof, english, goats, king, bees, beasts, horses, de, honey, doe, wolf, countrey, lion, oxen, crocodile, albertus, haue, sun, galen, vinegar, water, mans, goat, saith, hart, vipers, swine, winter, fox

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, they, their, them, his, he, him, i, her, we, you, she, our, its, themselves, us, himself, my, your, me, one, thy, ours, thee, vp, herself, ''s, theirs, mine, whereof, vnto, twelf, hee, s, itself, em, ye, unsleck''t, wr, us''d, thēselues, oleo, iu, hers, wax, vvhat, tollit, tinks, throng, there

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, little, many, such, good, young, long, white, small, much, black, old, certain, first, more, whole, own, most, greater, saith, full, hot, cold, several, common, short, strong, dead, best, sharp, hard, true, red, like, thick, large, right, round, sweet, venomous, second, able, broad, greatest, better, warm, new, excellent

not, so, also, then, very, therefore, more, up, thus, out, together, as, only, away, forth, most, much, first, yet, never, again, well, thereof, down, there, now, off, likewise, long, all, sometimes, especially, else, rather, often, easily, almost, presently, in, that, over, is, far, afterwards, before, even, once, afterward, somewhat, ever

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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