Distant Reader

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 is rooted in a currated HathiTrust collection metadata file. This resulted in a set of 112 item(s). The original versions of these items 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 website is a more verbose version of the narrative 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 & Scope

The study carrel is 10,638,194 words long. Each item in the study carrel is, on average, 94,983 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 83. 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:

said, one, will, now, man, time, little, old, mr, know, like, well, see, must, sir, never, made, much, house, good, room, may, us, two, might, way, eyes, say, day, night, lady, think, long, even, hand, door, shall, thought, came, great, come, yet, every, back, young, mind, still, without, ever, first

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are: 1) The mysteries of London With numerous illustrations by G. Stiff v.1, 2) The mysteries of London With numerous illustrations by G. Stiff v.2, and 3) The mysteries of London by George W. M. Reynolds v.3.

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

old man, young man, let us, young lady, old woman, la motte, said mr, last night, first time, every thing, next day, one day, resurrection man, great deal, old manor, manor house, old death, years ago, good deal, every one, van helsing, sir percival, next morning, long time, just now, dare say, come back, three impostors, many years, la luc, old lady, came back, sir jekyl, thousand pounds, old gentleman, every day, short time, young woman, one side, uncle silas, took place, two men, sir christopher, miss halcombe, will tell, will go, three days, dear sir, long ago, take care

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are: 1) The old manor house By Charlotte Smith v.37, 2) The old manor house By Charlotte Smith v.36, and 3) The mysteries of London by George W. M. Reynolds 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:

little time, god, man, look, time, long time, like, london, little, old man, little way, years old, little man, great man, good man, chapter, short time, poor old man, marquis, dead man, paris, woman, second time, old woman, old house, long, handsome young man, hand, eye, day, count, young man, venerable old man, usual time, unfortunate man, th e mummy, present time, poor man, old lady, new york, mrs. stafford, mr. smith, medical man, mean time, life, emily, castle, ſhe ſtill, ſaid emily, wywern mystery

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 said, and Adventures of Caleb Williams by William Godwin v. 1 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:

said, little, mr - Uncle Silas : a tale of Bartram-Haugh / by J. S. Le Fanu.
said, man, mr - The mysteries of London by George W. M. Reynolds v.4
said, time, man - The history of the caliph Vathek by William Beckford ; printed vebatim from the first ed., with the original preface and notes by Henley
ſhe, emily, ſaid - The mysteries of Udolpho, a romance; interspersed with some pieces of poetry By Ann Radcliffe v.2
said, lord, man - Faust : A romance by George W. M. Reynolds. With eleven illustrations by Sir John Gilbert and Henry Anelay

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?":

man, time, room, way, eyes, night, day, door, hand, house, moment, life, nothing, mind, heart, face, place, father, thing, head, woman, lady, friend, voice, one, words, something, men, morning, hands, ſhe, name, light, part, years, death, sir, world, people, side, hour, manner, things, word, bed, evening, mother, love, days, wife

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, is, be, have, were, said, been, do, are, did, has, know, am, see, made, say, think, come, 's, came, go, seemed, found, heard, saw, make, went, tell, thought, being, looked, take, took, let, having, left, knew, felt, give, told, seen, cried, put, turned, asked, done, stood, passed, gave

Proper Nouns

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

Mr., Mrs., Sir, Miss, Lady, Lord, God, ing, London, Count, Richard, Mary, Emily, St., c., thou, Dr., La, Madame, o., de, Adeline, Orlando, Captain, LONDON, Doctor, Earl, Charles, Alice, CHAPTER, ye, Baron, William, John, England, Street, Markham, M., Heaven, Robert, Vivaldi, Old, Marquis, HOUSE, heaven, ſhe, Isabella, Tom, House, Ellen

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?"

i, he, his, it, you, her, my, she, me, him, they, we, your, their, them, our, its, us, himself, myself, herself, yourself, itself, themselves, one, thy, thee, mine, ourselves, yours, herſelf, 'em, hers, myſelf, ye, de-, ours, 's, theirs, thyself, yourſelf, em, himſelf, ex-, s, i'm, ’s, you're, ’em, ay

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?"

little, old, other, own, good, more, great, young, such, few, same, last, poor, many, much, long, first, dear, strange, whole, new, full, dark, sure, certain, short, next, small, least, true, dead, better, black, very, white, able, open, large, possible, deep, happy, beautiful, present, low, high, only, best, right, cold, several

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

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.

Study carrel