Distant Reader - author-matherCotton-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 2021-05-24 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 12 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 249,724 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 20,810 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 95. 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, us, will, may, lord, man, one, now, shall, let, things, time, spirit, say, men, good, people, devil, world, every, yet, made, many, much, great, make, thing, first, day, come, well, like, among, must, soul, also, children, done, devils, new, see, self, christ, two, ever, hands, text, sin, life, without

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Small offers towards the service of the tabernacle in the wilderness four discourses accommodated unto the designs of practical godliness : preached partly at Boston, partly at Charleston / by Cotton Mather ; published by a gentleman lately restored from threatening sickness as a humble essay to serve the interest of religion, in gratitude unto God for his recovery., The wonders of the invisible world observations as well historical as theological upon the nature, the number and the operations of the devils : accompany''d with I. Some accounts of the greievous [sic] molestations by daemons and witchcrafts ... and the trials of some eminent malefactors ... II. Some councils directing a due improvement of the terrible things lately done by the unusual and amazing range of evil spirits ... III. Some conjectures upon the great events likely to befall the world in general and New England in particular ... IV. A short narrative of a late outrage committed by a knot of witches in Swedeland ... V. The devil discovered, in a brief discourse upon those temptations which are the more ordinary devices of the wicked one / by Cotton Mather., and The wonderful works of God commemorated praises bespoke for the God of heaven in a thanksgiving sermon delivered on Decemb. 19, 1689 : containing reflections upon the excellent things done by the great God ... : to which is added A sermon preached unto a convention of the Massachuset-colony in New-England ... / by Cotton Mather..

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

let us, lord jesus, among us, god will, jesus christ, early english, english books, every man, every one, excellent things, may say, books online, great god, every day, good man, god may, iesus christ, text creation, creation partnership, page images, lord iesus, almighty god, cotton mather, good men, two things, one another, great wrath, represented either, tcp schema, image sets, characters represented, will never, will make, take heed, make us, one thing, evil spirits, praise god, eternal god, serve god, hundred years, shall see, blessed god, will now, given us, years ago, military discipline, one man, may see, god shall

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The spirit of man, or, Some meditations (by way of essay) on the sense of that scripture, 1 Thes. 1:23 ... by Charles Morton ... The wonders of the invisible world observations as well historical as theological upon the nature, the number and the operations of the devils : accompany''d with I. Some accounts of the greievous [sic] molestations by daemons and witchcrafts ... and the trials of some eminent malefactors ... II. Some councils directing a due improvement of the terrible things lately done by the unusual and amazing range of evil spirits ... III. Some conjectures upon the great events likely to befall the world in general and New England in particular ... IV. A short narrative of a late outrage committed by a knot of witches in Swedeland ... V. The devil discovered, in a brief discourse upon those temptations which are the more ordinary devices of the wicked one / by Cotton Mather., and The wonderful works of God commemorated praises bespoke for the God of heaven in a thanksgiving sermon delivered on Decemb. 19, 1689 : containing reflections upon the excellent things done by the great God ... : to which is added A sermon preached unto a convention of the Massachuset-colony in New-England ... / by Cotton Mather..

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:

lord, god, tcp, world, new, english, england, children, thing, soul, psal, man, life, death, witch, time, spirit, presence, people, live, hands, excellent, devil, day, countrey, christ, book, wrath, woman, witches, witchcraft, weapons, understanding, text, sword, souls, souldiers, sins, sin, service, sect, rebellion, quakers, prov, prayers, prayer, praises, pardon, oakes, natural

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 The spirit of man, or, Some meditations (by way of essay) on the sense of that scripture, 1 Thes. 1:23 ... by Charles Morton ... 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, things, time, people, men, thing, t, day, self, world, way, soul, souls, hands, tho, devils, selves, death, life, sin, ▪, part, work, heart, children, none, name, persons, nothing, lives, text, words, sins, wrath, witches, hand, years, works, person, word, prayer, manner, end, hath, cause, place, others, child, times, sect

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, were, do, had, been, let, say, has, said, made, make, come, did, done, see, am, being, take, give, go, know, put, given, pray, find, found, think, set, read, brought, taken, serve, came, become, live, does, look, seen, keep, speak, having, leave, tell, consider, called, hear

Proper Nouns

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

god, lord, spirit, 〉, ◊, devil, t, 〈, thou, ●, world, christ, new, england, heaven, tcp, jesus, children, man, psal, english, soul, text, time, father, service, devils, witchcraft, hath, mather, grace, spirits, word, men, family, house, ye, prayer, hand, divel, countrey, holy, church, book, king, law, earth, yea, iesus, hell

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, i, we, our, you, he, his, they, us, them, their, him, your, my, me, her, she, thy, himself, thee, themselves, its, ''em, one, ''s, ourselves, mine, yours, ye, theirs, em, ours, thou, yourselves, us''d, yourself, l, herself, ha, elias, 〈, ti, s, o, ng, myself, iudg''d, hee, behaviours

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?"

such, many, good, more, great, other, own, much, little, first, same, old, poor, whole, last, very, present, full, best, true, few, better, sure, wicked, young, late, short, worthy, ready, most, high, early, due, several, evil, excellent, least, particular, able, english, long, right, less, dead, strong, small, glorious, terrible, general, horrible

not, so, now, then, very, more, here, also, thus, most, up, as, well, out, too, only, ever, yet, never, even, there, much, once, first, away, indeed, sometimes, in, therefore, down, again, often, still, all, off, just, over, long, hence, far, perhaps, unto, no, secondly, forth, especially, truly, particularly, before, together

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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