Distant Reader - adventureFiction-from-hathi

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 2021-01-24 by Eric Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>. The carrel was created using the Distant Reader trust process, and the input was a HaithTrust metadata (TSV) file locally cached with the name metadata.tsv. Given the metadata file, associated PDF documents where saved to a a cache and a second set of documents were saved to a set of plain text files. All of the analysis -- "reading" -- has been done against the 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

The study carrel is 13,141,712 words long. Each item in the study carrel is, on average, 76,405 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 illustrate the overall size of the study 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 88. 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 illustrate the overall readability of the study 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:

one, said, will, man, now, time, like, little, two, mr, see, made, well, us, know, good, came, great, day, back, old, go, come, way, men, much, long, must, may, never, first, night, hand, went, away, make, might, get, just, every, say, young, take, eyes, last, even, new, life, many, head

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are: 1) Godey''s magazine v.74-75 Jan.-Dec.1867, 2) McClure''s magazine v.36 1910:Nov./1911:Apr., and 3) The Ladies'' companion v.9-10 (1838-39).

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

jimmie dale, new york, old man, young man, let us, united states, one day, said mr, next day, every one, submarine boys, next morning, years ago, long time, first time, come back, one side, bobbsey twins, great deal, last night, one thing, go back, will go, two men, de la, every day, came back, jack benson, three days, white man, young lady, will take, old woman, will make, two hundred, good deal, two years, will give, london charivari, short time, gray seal, many years, just now, said mrs, take care, little girl, two days, young america, young men, will never

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are: 1) The adventures of Jimmie Dale by Frank L. Packard, 2) The further adventures of Jimmie Dale / By Frank L. Packard, and 3) Jimmie Dale and the phantom clue by Frank L. Packard ....

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 study carrel include:

god, man, new york, great man, good man, like, good, look, poor man, old man, king, white man, london, chapter, american, little time, little man, dead man, day, english, england, time, sick man, honest man, young man, story, rich man, long, little, good time, france, captain, submarine boys, new england, indians, thou, sir john, great, good old man, eye, blind man, aged man, wise man, united states, thy, tall man, second time, old men, old, new york city

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 said, and A boy scout in the Balkans / by John Finnemore ; with six coloured ilustrations by W.H.C. Groome 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 your 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:

said, man, time - The case of Mrs. Wingate by Oscar Micheaux
said, man, like - Zenobia, queen of Palmyra; a tale of the Roman empire in the days of the Emperor Aurelian.
mr, said, man - The submarine boys on duty : or, Life on a diving torpedo boat, by Lieut. Commander Victor G. Durham
said, little, mrs - The English and Scottish popular ballads. v.1
fogg, thou, thy - The American Revolution in drawings and prints; a checklist of 1765-1790 graphics in the Library of Congress. Compiled by Donald H. Cresswell, with a foreword by Sinclair H. Hitchings.

Moreover, the totality of the study carrel's aboutness, can be visualized with the following pie chart:

Noun & Verbs

Through an analysis of the 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, day, way, men, night, hand, eyes, life, head, face, place, room, nothing, house, door, side, one, father, thing, water, moment, people, years, heart, woman, boy, hands, something, world, name, days, work, mother, feet, part, voice, morning, things, country, mind, death, girl, sea, end, love, story, light, hour, ship

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, had, is, be, have, were, said, are, do, been, did, has, see, 's, made, know, came, come, go, went, make, get, say, take, am, being, think, found, let, saw, tell, took, got, put, looked, asked, seemed, going, give, thought, heard, left, knew, told, turned, called, seen, done, having, look

Proper Nouns

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

Mr., Mrs., Jack, Captain, God, Tom, Miss, New, Sir, _, Lord, Dale, John, Jimmie, England, de, thou, York, London, St., ye, King, America, Lady, ., Peter, Paul, Dick, English, Benson, sir, Frank, Mary, M., France, Freddie, Street, James, George, States, J., House, General, II, Larry, Doctor, Henry, William, S., Charles

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?"

i, he, it, his, you, her, they, she, him, my, we, me, their, them, your, our, its, us, himself, myself, thy, themselves, herself, thee, itself, one, yourself, ourselves, 'em, mine, ye, yours, 's, hers, ’em, em, ’s, yer, theirs, ours, him-, thou, thyself, hee, ex-, aught, withal, thine, be-, o’er

Below are words cloud of the 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 this study carrel positive or negative?"

little, other, good, great, old, more, own, young, many, last, such, first, same, few, long, much, new, white, small, poor, next, black, full, large, whole, right, sure, best, true, better, several, open, high, dead, ready, big, short, dear, strange, dark, least, able, second, certain, low, most, only, possible, beautiful, fair

not, so, then, up, now, n't, out, very, down, here, as, only, again, there, more, never, too, back, away, just, well, even, still, off, on, in, all, once, ever, most, much, soon, n’t, far, yet, over, long, always, almost, also, however, enough, perhaps, quite, no, thus, before, together, rather, suddenly

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.