Distant Reader - author-sergeantJohn-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 25 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,533,376 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 61,335 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 89. 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:

faith, one, us, thing, will, may, must, church, first, self, nature, yet, reason, words, make, true, man, since, now, things, god, therefore, rule, way, onely, word, say, without, much, notion, truth, made, good, power, see, know, dr, nothing, another, whole, authority, men, tradition, many, evident, two, either, common, also, part

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Schism dispach''t or A rejoynder to the replies of Dr. Hammond and the Ld of Derry., Five Catholick letters concerning the means of knowing with absolute certainty what faith now held was taught by Jesus Christ written by J. Sergeant upon occasion of a conference between Dr. Stillingfleet and Mr. Peter Gooden., and Errour non-plust, or, Dr. Stillingfleet shown to be the man of no principles with an essay how discourses concerning Catholick grounds bear the highest evidence..

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

tells us, let us, one another, absolute certainty, first principles, christian faith, must needs, tell us, much less, absolutely certain, first principle, must necessarily, one thing, give us, make use, every thing, common sense, natural notions, catholick church, must either, holy ghost, early english, english books, scriptural examples, every one, english examples, every man, identical propositions, learned men, true faith, divine nature, books online, whole world, whence follows, two things, make good, one word, whole church, us see, will needs, make us, greek church, true nature, gives us, right reason, told us, made use, man living, moral certainty, page images

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Schism dispach''t or A rejoynder to the replies of Dr. Hammond and the Ld of Derry. A vindication of the doctrine contained in Pope Benedict XII, his bull and in the General Council of Florence, under Eugenius the III concerning the state of departed souls : in answer to a certain letter, printed and published against it, by an unknown author, under this title, A letter in answer to the late dispensers of Pope Benedict XII, his bull, &c., wherein the progress of Master Whites lately minted Purgatory is laid open and its grounds examined ... / by S.W., and Transnatural philosophy, or, Metaphysicks demonstrating the essences and operations of all beings whatever ... and shewing the perfect conformity of Christian faith to right reason, and the unreasonableness of atheists ... and other sectaries : with an appendix giving a rational explication of the mystery of the most B. Trinity / by J.S..

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:

church, faith, reason, scripture, truth, nature, certainty, thing, rule, god, tradition, man, authority, world, discourse, understanding, soul, reader, pope, notion, letter, king, grounds, way, tcp, subject, sense, principles, power, matter, council, book, body, testimony, st., sence, proposition, points, men, knowledge, ens, effect, christ, catholick, apostles, answer, word, sir, science, schism

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 faith, and Errour non-plust, or, Dr. Stillingfleet shown to be the man of no principles with an essay how discourses concerning Catholick grounds bear the highest evidence. 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?":

thing, t, self, words, reason, p., things, way, faith, man, nothing, nature, word, part, men, time, power, scripture, others, truth, notions, knowledge, place, body, none, manner, point, tradition, sense, case, one, tho, kind, question, evidence, end, hee, world, rule, mind, understanding, reader, terms, sence, whence, points, ▪, order, means, cause

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, being, had, were, do, make, has, say, made, been, ''s, know, see, did, does, let, put, take, according, said, think, give, found, come, done, taken, follows, makes, having, prove, hold, held, am, known, bee, given, speak, find, call, follow, tell, believe, tells, use, show, mean

Proper Nouns

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

〉, ◊, 〈, faith, church, god, nature, c., dr., s., notion, rule, authority, christ, certainty, mr., principles, peter, first, tradition, grounds, l., truth, pope, christian, man, divine, st., discourse, world, h., power, soul, act, matter, common, schism, thing, doctrine, book, ens, existence, sense, natural, essence, ●, science, reason, letter, ground

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, he, his, i, they, their, them, we, you, our, us, him, my, your, her, himself, its, me, themselves, she, thy, thee, one, theirs, ours, yours, mine, ''s, ''em, us''d, prov''d, herself, hers, hee, itself, em, s, myself, whosoever, ts, †, à, ye, whereof, vnto, dy''d, ay, pe, ob, non

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, other, same, own, true, more, many, first, good, whole, evident, certain, great, particular, former, impossible, false, common, least, very, much, proper, best, most, new, necessary, possible, present, less, plain, little, distinct, last, better, perfect, greater, capable, several, second, clear, different, right, able, infallible, contrary, sufficient, next, private, full, sure

not, so, then, more, now, most, as, therefore, thus, onely, is, that, very, yet, only, also, never, here, all, even, first, ever, much, at, too, well, still, there, far, out, up, consequently, hence, indeed, again, otherwise, rather, down, else, absolutely, perhaps, lastly, together, truly, once, clearly, evidently, perfectly, no, necessarily

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.