blackLivesMatter-from-scholar


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 2021-04-05 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 604 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 3,268,425 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 5,411 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.

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histogram of sizes
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box plot of sizes

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 58. 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.

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histogram of readability
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box plot of readability

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:

https, black, org, www, social, com, http, doi, new, university, political, people, one, health, also, american, public, white, research, us, police, lives, race, work, media, racial, women, movement, cambridge, may, politics, matter, time, students, de, will, african, studies, core, press, journal, state, use, many, world, see, terms, community, first, justice

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Seeing Black Lives Matter and the Alt-Right Through an Existential Lens: From Responses to Death to Rebellion and Revolution, Do All Black Lives Matter Equally to Black People? Respectability Politics and the Limitations of Linked Fate, and Black Lives Matter, and Yes, You are Racist: The Parallelism of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.

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

black lives, lives matter, new york, org core, et al, united states, social media, core terms, university press, african american, sbref http, public health, black people, social justice, kg nd, black women, african americans, political science, human rights, available online, civil rights, higher education, cambridge core, terms https, mental health, social movements, carnegie mellon, mellon university, health care, matter movement, collective action, com news, york times, html https, de la, du bois, special issue, org licenses, police brutality, police violence, george floyd, core https, pdf https, climate change, oxford university, white supremacy, social movement, black americans, south africa, american studies

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Seeing Black Lives Matter and the Alt-Right Through an Existential Lens: From Responses to Death to Rebellion and Revolution ARTICLE: #Black Lives Matter? Analyzing the Effects of Police-Caused Black Deaths on Media Coverage and Public Interest in the Movement, and Culturally sustaining pedagogy in higher education: teaching so that Black Lives Matter.

While often deemed superficial or sophomoric, rudimentary frequencies and their associated "word clouds" can be quite insightful:

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unigrams
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bigrams

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:

university, black, press, american, pmc, health, new, york, covid-19, social, political, white, african, united, life, studies, science, student, americans, usa, states, public, matter, cambridge, journal, education, u.s., right, police, canada, south, june, indigenous, blm, africa, woman, trump, politics, justice, history, twitter, study, community, world, violence, race, october, medium, july, human

And now word clouds really begin to shine:

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keywords

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 https, and Racism in academia, and why the ''little things'' matter 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:

  1. black - Seeing Black Lives Matter and the Alt-Right Through an Existential Lens: From Responses to Death to Rebellion and Revolution
  2. 2020 - Federal Agents Use ZnCl2 Gas Against Black Lives Matter Protesters
  3. media - Almanya nın Sosyal Ağ Yasasının Nefret Söylemi İçeriklerinin Kaldırılması Bakımından İncelenmesi: Türkiye İçin Öneriler

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:

  1. black, https, org - Seeing Black Lives Matter and the Alt-Right Through an Existential Lens: From Responses to Death to Rebellion and Revolution
  2. 2020, health, 10 - Federal Agents Use ZnCl2 Gas Against Black Lives Matter Protesters
  3. media, social, digital - Do We Need a Great Reset? COVID-19, Black Revolution, Inequality and Common Good
  4. https, 2020, www - What''s in a Name? Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia and the Impact of Names and Name Authorities in Archival Description
  5. com, http, la - Almanya nın Sosyal Ağ Yasasının Nefret Söylemi İçeriklerinin Kaldırılması Bakımından İncelenmesi: Türkiye İçin Öneriler

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

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topic model

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?":

people, police, health, race, students, time, work, women, media, research, movement, %, lives, community, state, history, racism, politics, violence, life, data, groups, world, justice, power, example, way, use, group, education, study, studies, article, terms, rights, action, p., analysis, ways, part, communities, death, identity, issues, others, issue, class, culture, years, change

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, have, was, has, were, been, do, see, had, being, based, does, �, used, including, make, accessed, ’s, made, did, take, using, found, given, published, think, use, become, need, come, provide, understand, include, know, following, working, making, am, create, find, help, called, related, get, engage, associated, work, address

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nouns
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verbs

Proper Nouns

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

_, university, black, new, press, al, york, j., journal, matter, american, e, �, united, de, m., et, social, states, health, americans, us, d, la, s., s, m, studies, african, cambridge, america, research, pp, n, d., c., white, r., public, w, o, review, e., b, u.s., politics, science, l., london, usa

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, we, their, i, they, our, its, his, he, you, her, them, my, us, she, me, your, themselves, itself, one, him, ourselves, himself, myself, herself, ’s, em, yourself, oneself, mine, theirs, eds, ours, https://doi.org/10.1017/s1742058x16000254, на, https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.01.20205377, zelf, y’, yours, ya, ce, zncl2, ha, , ¥, https://doi.org/10.1017/hor.2017.128, de-, accountabil-, rd, vshflÀfdoo\

Below are words cloud of your study carrel's proper & personal pronouns.

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proper nouns
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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?"

black, social, political, other, such, -, white, racial, public, many, new, american, more, available, african, different, cultural, first, important, human, own, critical, same, economic, global, non, collective, historical, national, ethnic, digital, particular, local, higher, recent, specific, current, likely, anti, most, high, significant, online, good, early, subject, individual, indigenous, second, academic

not, also, more, only, as, so, well, even, however, often, up, most, out, then, n’t, just, rather, now, thus, here, still, very, especially, back, together, less, first, e.g., particularly, much, on, too, yet, always, instead, indeed, therefore, far, further, never, perhaps, already, down, online, simply, again, all, long, away, specifically

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adjectives
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adverbs

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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