Distant Reader - fredrickDouglass-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 25 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,404,539 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 56,181 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 61. 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:

african, american, black, new, one, hip, hop, people, also, white, culture, within, philadelphia, university, americans, social, will, like, community, cultural, see, time, press, life, first, many, states, women, political, race, power, research, man, york, work, law, study, may, self, rights, way, well, even, just, northern, family, history, slavery, chapter, racial

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The Beautiful Struggle: an Analysis of Hip Hop Icons, Archetypes, and Aesthetics, FIGHTING FOR ECONOMIC STABILITY IN A TIME OF UNCERTAINTY: AFRICAN AMERICAN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN PHILADELPHIA 1940 - 1970, and Ankh, Ujda, Seneb (Life, Strength, Health): "Let Food Be Thy Medicine," An Epistemic Examination on the Genealogy of the Africana Holistic Health Tradition, with Preliminary Considerations in the City of Philadelphia, 1967 to the Present.

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

african american, hip hop, african americans, new york, northern ireland, united states, university press, hop aesthetics, study abroad, civil rights, du bois, popular culture, black people, supra note, philadelphia tribune, hop culture, holistic health, black power, within hip, star trek, american community, et al, american popular, economic development, temple university, black women, higher education, twentieth century, natural law, american economic, child custody, loan associations, science fiction, west indies, martin luther, human rights, american culture, rasta readers, black community, even though, oxford university, cultural diversity, homeless man, american citizenship, north carolina, civil war, west belfast, elijah muhammad, black men, nineteenth century

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The Beautiful Struggle: an Analysis of Hip Hop Icons, Archetypes, and Aesthetics FIGHTING FOR ECONOMIC STABILITY IN A TIME OF UNCERTAINTY: AFRICAN AMERICAN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN PHILADELPHIA 1940 - 1970, and Race Financial Institutions, Credit Discrimination And African American Homeownership In Philadelphia, 1880-1960.

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:

press, new, york, university, black, american, african, united, states, white, u.s., philadelphia, law, journal, west, washington, negro, king, james, jamaica, ibid, god, european, education, chapter, british, world, woman, studies, south, power, north, murphy, michael, joseph, jackson, irish, ireland, institute, humanity, ethiopia, dr., douglass, court, congress, community, commission, civil, city, chicago

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 african, and "I Kept It to Myself": Young Jamaican Men Who Have Sex with Men''s Experiences with Childhood Sexual Abuse and Sexual Assault 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:

african, black, american - Ankh, Ujda, Seneb (Life, Strength, Health): "Let Food Be Thy Medicine," An Epistemic Examination on the Genealogy of the Africana Holistic Health Tradition, with Preliminary Considerations in the City of Philadelphia, 1967 to the Present
northern, ireland, african - Multiculturalism and sectarianism in post-agreement Northern Ireland
black, people, rastafari - Warriors and Prophets of Livity: Samson and Moses as Moral Exemplars in Rastafari
hip, hop, african - The Beautiful Struggle: an Analysis of Hip Hop Icons, Archetypes, and Aesthetics
slavery, law, rights - Is mere color such a fact? : American citizens, British subjects and the struggle for African-American citizenship

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?":

people, hop, hip, culture, community, time, women, life, race, research, man, way, self, identity, work, power, family, chapter, history, rights, law, study, years, health, part, men, students, aesthetics, slavery, food, slave, world, education, example, movement, society, narratives, racism, state, experience, individuals, system, body, children, discourse, class, order, century, analysis, development

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, was, are, be, have, were, had, has, do, been, did, see, being, ’s, made, does, used, know, make, based, get, go, take, found, come, said, say, become, according, given, am, became, came, going, think, understand, got, called, want, including, give, put, went, created, use, considered, having, making, began, suggests

Proper Nouns

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

african, new, americans, philadelphia, black, university, press, york, american, _, ireland, america, northern, united, states, rastafari, ibid, africa, moses, jah, god, negro, u.s., rasta, doctor, j., west, south, journal, africans, john, ed, m., london, washington, hip, white, pennington, ., samson, williams, rastas, hsh, ’s, chicago, state, north, r., james, bible

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, their, he, they, you, her, we, she, my, its, them, me, our, him, your, us, themselves, itself, himself, herself, one, myself, ourselves, yourself, ’s, oneself, em, thy, thee, ya, mine, thyself, theirs, yours, ours, ’em, y'', ''s, ''em, y, y’, ye, ya’ll, hisself, u, short-, s, re)producing

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?"

african, american, black, other, such, -, white, social, cultural, many, new, political, own, racial, first, economic, more, human, same, different, free, popular, important, public, homeless, historical, natural, good, able, early, most, particular, anti, medical, racist, legal, contemporary, personal, various, second, post, much, sectarian, local, several, national, dominant, multicultural, real, religious

not, also, so, more, n’t, only, as, up, even, just, however, then, out, well, often, most, now, thus, abroad, back, here, still, very, rather, never, always, there, therefore, on, down, really, too, later, again, in, much, first, further, particularly, away, yet, together, especially, all, instead, furthermore, far, e.g., directly, indeed

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.