Distant Reader - doyle-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 2021-02-14 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 1,466,741 words long. Each item in the study carrel is, on average, 61,114 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 81. 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, th, line, british, men, division, said, man, two, great, brigade, will, left, battle, now, may, right, back, time, day, attack, made, front, general, us, south, german, well, came, last, corps, advance, north, long, chapter, held, army, way, sir, second, many, little, guns, see, still, whole, come, st, three, position

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are: 1) The great Boer War by Arthur Conan Doyle , 2) The British campaign in France and Flanders / by Arthur Conan Doyle v.5, and 3) Sir Nigel / by Arthur Conan Doyle .

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

th brigade, british campaign, second battle, last galley, boer war, magic door, great boer, third army, british line, second division, seventh division, rodney stone, fourth division, third division, rd brigade, sir nigel, light infantry, chapter iii, fourth army, ninth division, front line, chapter iv, third corps, mounted infantry, st brigade, heavy losses, sixth division, nd brigade, de wet, last bow, either side, eighth division, third battle, south africa, sir charles, fifth corps, th royal, american adventure, one side, sir john, let us, hundred yards, british army, next day, two hundred, great britain, two days, free state, next morning, chapter vi

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are: 1) The British campaign in France and Flanders / by Arthur Conan Doyle v.5, 2) The British campaign in France and Flanders / by Arthur Conan Doyle. v.3, and 3) The British campaign in France and Flanders / by Arthur Conan Doyle. v.4.

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:

man, second division, london, england, seventh division, mr., british campaign, british army, great, god, fourth division, chapter, british line, sixth ulster division, sixth division, riﬂe brigade, mrs., guards brigade, good, fifth division, chapter division, case, british, twelfth division, time, thin man, single man, seventeenth corps, second corps, second cavalry division, royal naval division, royal fusiliers, old man, new zealand division, look, like, life, infantry brigade, highland territorial division, hand, great man, german line, german attack, general sir, fourth corps, fourth australian division, fourteenth light division, faced man, english, dead man

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 line, and A visit to three fronts: glimpses of the British, Italian and French lines, by Arthur Conan Doyle... 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:

division, line, brigade - The British campaign in France and Flanders / by Arthur Conan Doyle. v.3
said, man, sir - Sir Nigel / by Arthur Conan Doyle
men, british, boer - The great Boer War by Arthur Conan Doyle
said, man, mr - His last bow : a reminiscence of Sherlock Holmes / by Arthur Conan Doyle
great, mr, man - The wanderings of a spiritualist, by Arthur Conan Doyle

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?":

line, men, man, time, day, attack, front, chapter, way, guns, right, advance, position, enemy, battle, left, night, side, north, face, hand, morning, end, one, eyes, force, point, war, ground, life, days, work, troops, nothing, country, village, trenches, place, infantry, part, south, head, hands, door, case, action, miles, losses, world, evening

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:

was, had, were, is, have, be, been, are, said, has, do, made, came, held, see, come, did, found, taken, being, 's, left, say, know, get, done, take, saw, took, seen, make, am, carried, lay, lost, got, cried, think, passed, go, brought, fell, give, heard, turned, put, wounded, ing, went, looked

Proper Nouns

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

Division, Brigade, Corps, General, Germans, Battle, Mr., Army, Colonel, Sir, BRITISH, Boers, Lord, British, French, Nigel, Third, Boer, Fusiliers, Somme, Second, Royal, Holmes, March, Captain, London, South, April, _, Wood, Guards, Major, August, Ypres, New, Fourth, CAMPAIGN, July, Fifth, England, River, September, First, St., John, West, October, Hill, Infantry, Thirty

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, his, he, you, their, they, my, we, them, him, me, our, her, its, she, your, us, himself, themselves, one, itself, myself, ourselves, yourself, herself, mine, yours, theirs, 'em, thy, ours, thee, d'you, our-, hers, ex-, ’em, evi-, des-, oneself, hor-, em, cer-, imself, him-, 's, ye, pos-, ioth

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?"

great, other, british, own, german, last, little, many, good, same, such, old, more, whole, heavy, long, small, few, second, new, strong, first, 2nd, young, high, 1st, ﬁrst, able, right, clear, general, several, much, large, full, next, open, black, dead, very, possible, best, considerable, french, hard, white, dark, strange, short, better

not, so, up, very, now, then, out, more, back, only, down, as, still, never, most, also, once, ever, well, again, however, here, there, even, far, on, off, forward, yet, away, already, n't, too, in, all, just, about, always, over, much, long, indeed, together, rather, no, hardly, soon, nearly, before, suddenly

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.