Distant Reader - author-stillingfleetEdward-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 2021-05-23 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 74 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 4,167,228 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 56,313 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 90. 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:

church, god, one, may, will, men, us, must, things, christ, yet, saith, faith, great, much, therefore, reason, make, made, doth, thing, power, first, say, world, now, worship, true, time, man, sense, without, divine, nature, scripture, among, shall, churches, way, good, doctrine, might, many, persons, words, law, de, others, whether, nothing

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are A rational account of the grounds of Protestant religion being a vindication of the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury''s relation of a conference, &c., from the pretended answer by T.C. : wherein the true grounds of faith are cleared and the false discovered, the Church of England vindicated from the imputation of schism, and the most important particular controversies between us and those of the Church of Rome throughly examined / by Edward Stillingfleet ..., A defence of the discourse concerning the idolatry practised in the Church of Rome in answer to a book entituled, Catholicks no idolators / by Ed. Stillingfleet ..., and Irenicum A weapon-salve for the churches wounds, or The divine right of particular forms of church-government : discuss''d and examin''d according to the principles of the law of nature .../ by Edward Stillingfleete ....

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

roman church, catholick church, tells us, holy ghost, divine worship, christian church, let us, two things, every one, tell us, general council, divine revelation, christian religion, among us, general councils, english books, early english, humane nature, divine nature, true god, will appear, christian faith, divine faith, primitive church, make use, books online, new testament, absolute certainty, made use, one another, nothing else, much less, take away, churches infallibility, whole church, must needs, supreme god, greek church, christian world, taken away, religious worship, great deal, every thing, creation partnership, page images, text creation, men may, will never, god will, every man

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are A second discourse in vindication of the Protestant grounds of faith, against the pretence of infallibility in the Roman Church in answer to The guide in controversies by R.H., Protestancy without principles, and Reason and religion, or, The certain rule of faith by E.W. : with a particular enquiry into the miracles of the Roman Church / by Edward Stillingfleet ... An answer to some papers lately printed concerning the authority of the Catholick Church in matters of faith, and the reformation of the Church of England, and Fanaticism fanatically imputed to the Catholick church by Doctour Stillingfleet and the imputation refuted and retorted / by S.C. a Catholick ....

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:

god, church, religion, world, tcp, law, scripture, doctrine, christ, authority, council, christian, power, king, faith, son, reason, churches, roman, pope, apostles, people, laws, body, spirit, sense, lord, government, bishops, man, gospel, city, tradition, saviour, nature, holy, divine, book, rule, persons, men, communion, bishop, worship, truth, testimony, substance, st., saints, jews

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 church, and The doctrine of the Trinity and transubstantiation compared as to Scripture, reason, and tradition. The first part in a new dialogue between a Protestant and a papist : wherein an answer is given to the late proofs of the antiquity of transubstantiation in the books called Consensus veterum and Nubes testium, &c. 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?":

things, men, thing, p., reason, time, man, way, words, others, nothing, sense, power, scripture, world, worship, people, doth, nature, self, faith, persons, sins, matter, person, hath, case, account, viz, sin, part, religion, order, body, church, place, truth, one, mind, purpose, images, none, life, saith, end, use, punishment, death, argument, name

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, was, are, have, were, had, do, did, being, been, make, made, say, said, believe, think, see, give, prove, come, take, given, done, saith, concerning, know, find, taken, thought, called, according, suppose, let, makes, hath, set, consider, appears, put, used, came, appear, doth, understand, understood, deny, seems, found, received

Proper Nouns

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

〉, ◊, 〈, god, church, christ, c., faith, l., law, council, st., s., rome, doctrine, p., de, pope, divine, churches, authority, hath, bishop, christian, bishops, world, king, christians, ●, power, roman, son, mr., catholick, idolatry, d., nature, lord, i., england, heaven, gospel, infallibility, n., holy, government, book, father, sect, t.

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, they, his, them, their, we, i, our, you, him, us, your, himself, themselves, my, her, me, its, she, one, thy, theirs, thee, ours, yours, ye, mine, ''s, itself, herself, ●, whosoever, us''d, thou, non, myself, hers, à, ts, ourselves, hitherto, elias, ay, yt, y, whereof, whence, wh, nay

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, great, same, own, true, many, more, first, good, necessary, much, particular, several, present, saith, whole, certain, greater, common, infallible, divine, sufficient, greatest, little, proper, former, general, plain, least, new, very, last, different, clear, possible, impossible, ancient, distinct, false, evident, second, best, better, most, old, due, full, large, main

not, so, then, only, therefore, as, more, very, now, most, yet, much, never, far, up, well, here, ever, out, too, there, thus, still, first, all, down, in, even, together, at, no, away, rather, before, else, onely, just, off, again, afterwards, otherwise, long, certainly, already, especially, on, easily, over, indeed, enough

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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