Distant Reader - britishColonistHandbooks-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 9,746,554 words long. Each item in the study carrel is, on average, 110,756 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 76. 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, may, miles, will, per, two, great, new, land, st, shall, th, country, river, water, south, made, time, also, large, good, years, town, well, part, feet, year, many, every, first, now, british, three, government, road, island, small, much, north, place, general, found, west, mr, colony, east, port, long, number, little

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are: 1) The Bengal and Agra annual guide and gazetteer 1842 v.2:1-3, 2) The merchant, ship-owner, and ship-master''s import and export guide : comprising every species of authentic information relative to shipping, navigation and commerce ... by Charles Pope , and 3) Handbook for Egypt and the Sudan ed. by H. R. Hall .

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

new zealand, per cent, united kingdom, united states, per acre, new south, south wales, great britain, pc pc, per annum, south africa, square miles, south australia, years ago, east india, new york, per lb, west indies, ditto ditto, three years, feet high, cape town, per day, public works, legislative council, road good, post office, per ton, many years, western australia, two years, th january, water plentiful, th june, one hundred, two miles, five years, ten years, roman catholic, five miles, three miles, six miles, crown lands, nova scotia, west coast, took place, miles long, either side, four miles, british world

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are: 1) New Zealand official yearbook 4th ed. (1895), 2) Handbook for Australia & New Zealand (including also the Fiji Islands) with new map of the colonies , and 3) A popular handbook to New Zealand, its resources and industries : with introduction on New Zealand as an English middle-class emigration field, and personal experiences during a four years'' residence in the colony .

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:

new south wales, south australia, british government, united states, new york, new zealand, east india company, british india, western australia, united kingdom, great britain, victoria, new plymouth, mr., government house, upper canada, new zealand company, new england, europe, english, guide, england, south island, river st. lawrence, government, dutch east india, canada, british north america, british columbia, british, year, st. john, south africa, s. w. silver, quebec, new orleans, new brunswick, mr. john, miles long, london, lake ontario, j. w., good land, good, european, cape colony, british subject, western india, w. h., sydney

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 miles, and A popular handbook to New Zealand, its resources and industries : with introduction on New Zealand as an English middle-class emigration field, and personal experiences during a four years'' residence in the colony 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:

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?":

miles, country, land, water, time, years, feet, year, part, place, town, river, number, road, day, side, acres, city, sea, district, men, line, colony, soil, ft, island, goods, population, work, way, value, ground, name, parts, duty, cent, vessels, people, places, gold, end, trade, coast, order, sheep, a., north, o, m., persons

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, was, have, been, has, were, being, had, made, found, do, called, having, taken, said, used, see, known, make, given, built, seen, take, following, situated, paid, obtained, carried, give, brought, imported, according, required, put, covered, sent, become, passed, cut, held, formed, come, established, left, ing, done, kept, including

Proper Nouns

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

W., J., ., New, St., Mr., S., E., H., C., Government, c., South, M., India, Bay, River, R., N., United, G., Port, Cape, General, England, Company, Island, Sir, June, Governor, F., John, Australia, |, May, Town, July, London, Victoria, A., B., Zealand, T., Great, North, Jamaica, P., West, Council, Colony

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, their, they, his, its, he, them, i, we, our, him, her, you, themselves, himself, itself, my, us, your, she, me, one, myself, ourselves, herself, yourself, mine, ex-, thy, em, theirs, hereinbefore, thither, thee, s, ours, des-, pos-, sea-, yours, orna-, be-, ther, him-, thereof, oneself, oﬁ, yon, evi-, can-

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?"

other, such, great, large, good, same, many, small, first, more, british, few, little, several, high, new, old, free, much, present, long, best, general, last, fine, public, whole, native, various, own, -, less, most, white, open, total, principal, considerable, necessary, latter, important, dry, common, beautiful, english, numerous, foreign, rich, greater, full

not, very, so, also, about, now, most, well, only, up, as, more, out, then, here, however, much, even, far, generally, still, nearly, down, almost, thus, in, there, long, on, off, once, too, often, soon, always, especially, again, never, first, away, together, ever, probably, already, sometimes, yet, therefore, less, rather, usually

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.