Distant Reader - henryDavidThoreau-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 453 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 2,851,189 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 6,321 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 60. 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:

de, la, new, http, one, nature, en, american, also, org, university, que, social, al, www, et, com, life, may, world, el, press, time, human, thoreau, environmental, people, change, doi, research, will, first, many, history, use, see, species, work, science, los, york, se, studies, journal, well, pp, natural, century, https, like

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Política sin matar: los métodos de la acción no-violenta, A 2.8-7.5 PJ/PULSE HIGHLY-FLEXIBLE IMPULSE-RADIO ULTRA-WIDEBAND PULSE-GENERATOR, and Democracy and the Limits of Reason: Why a sustained defense of liberal commitments is necessary to counter democracy''s disinformation and xenophobia [La democracia y los límites de la razón: por qué es necesaria una defensa continuada de los compromisos liberales para contrarrestar la desinformación y la xenofobia].

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

et al, new york, de la, university press, climate change, sbref http, united states, henry david, david thoreau, org core, de los, en la, new england, en el, de las, th century, core terms, civil disobedience, nineteenth century, que se, oxford university, research feed, save alert, alert research, org licenses, harvard university, cambridge university, cr cr, ralph waldo, citizen science, gov pubmed, see also, natural world, lo que, twentieth century, waldo emerson, de una, que la, american studies, american literature, north america, iscu ssio, natural resources, con la, pdf http, human beings, dopt abstract, abstract http, cambridge core, sustainable development

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Evolutionary and Ecological Responses to Anthropogenic Climate Change: Update on Anthropogenic Climate Change Taking the Long View: Integrating Recorded, Archeological, Paleoecological, and Evolutionary Data into Ecological Restoration, and Evolutionary and plastic responses to climate change in terrestrial plant populations.

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:

university, american, press, new, thoreau, york, nature, que, pmc, emerson, walden, feed, america, change, united, social, los, gandhi, education, journal, history, john, usa, student, science, london, literature, life, god, environmental, climate, cavell, cambridge, vol, studies, states, india, england, del, bir, religion, national, las, ecology, earth, civil, world, wilderness, western, u.s.

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 la, and Terra Incognita: Literary Maps and Nature Representations in Jon Krakauer''s Into The Wild 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:

nature, new, american - "These French Canadian of the Woods are Half-Wild Folk": Wilderness, Whiteness, and Work in North America, 1840–1955
new, university, american -
http, et, al - Variation in fiber cables in the lacunae of leaves in hybrid swarms of Typha×glauca
la, que, en - Política sin matar: los métodos de la acción no-violenta
ve, bir, la - LEGITIMACY OF CIVIL RESISTANCE – SOME THEORETICAL ASPECTS

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?":

nature, time, life, people, world, species, change, history, p., work, way, century, %, use, research, o, e, science, study, example, climate, studies, data, years, self, culture, part, r, development, students, place, order, power, system, sense, environment, land, experience, landscape, terms, process, education, case, society, community, n, state, t, conservation, others

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, has, were, been, do, had, see, used, based, being, does, make, made, did, found, using, including, become, published, given, come, take, use, provide, find, know, ’s, called, include, read, think, known, making, according, following, became, seen, developed, seems, understand, say, makes, help, need, get, go

Proper Nouns

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

de, la, y, new, _, que, al, university, e, el, thoreau, press, et, j., los, york, american, se, m., del, un, journal, america, s, pp, o, las, d, s., una, john, ., r., ve, c., j, emerson, da, a, m, d., david, cambridge, united, bir, u, por, �, c, t

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, his, their, we, i, he, they, its, our, her, you, them, my, she, us, him, your, itself, me, one, themselves, himself, em, ourselves, herself, myself, ya, oneself, yourself, ’s, http://refhub.elsevier.com/s0304-3770(15)00026-1/sbref0270, http://refhub.elsevier.com/s0304-3770(15)00026-1/sbref0245, http://refhub.elsevier.com/s0304-3770(15)00026-1/sbref0090, mine, na, theirs, ours, de-, u, thy, http://refhub.elsevier.com/s0304-3770(15)00026-1/sbref0190, http://refhub.elsevier.com/s0304-3770(15)00026-1/sbref0145, je, ha, y, pobreza, o, hr, eighteenth-, 행동

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?"

other, such, social, many, new, american, human, environmental, -, more, natural, first, different, political, own, cultural, important, ecological, same, economic, public, available, modern, early, most, long, historical, non, scientific, high, true, large, local, particular, moral, good, religious, urban, literary, great, global, personal, small, common, several, much, individual, critical, general, civil

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

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.