Distant Reader - history472-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 11,910,057 words long. Each item in the study carrel is, on average, 147,037 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 75. 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, chinese, will, china, two, may, great, time, th, made, de, first, now, us, also, many, government, people, long, foreign, much, men, three, trade, day, country, mr, said, every, years, year, japanese, must, place, well, man, part, canton, little, new, city, without, large, general, good, small, way, present, found, british

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are: 1) The Chinese repository v.16-20, 2) The Chinese repository v.11-15, and 3) The Chinese repository. v.1-5 1832-1834.

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

united states, hong kong, de la, per cent, great britain, three years, years ago, chinese government, one hundred, new york, next day, foreign countries, foreign trade, lines long, last year, took place, foreign relations, two years, every one, chinese language, let us, one day, british government, far east, chinese empire, united kingdom, one side, north china, chinese ports, well known, many years, japanese government, foreign affairs, next morning, th year, present time, th day, two hundred, foreign office, feet high, short time, old man, th moon, chinese authorities, japanese repository, three days, first time, great wall, yellow river, five years

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are: 1) Foreign relations of the United States : diplomatic papers Department of State, United States of America 1931/1941:suppl.:Japan:v.1:c.2, 2) Hong Kong under Japanese occupation; a case study in the enemy''s techniques of control prepared by Robert S. Ward, American Consul, detailed to the Far Eastern Unit, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Dept. of Commerce, and 3) Hong Kong..

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:

chinese government, china, chinese, chinese people, chinese character, chinese city, japanese government, chinese history, chinese empire, japanese, japan, chinese language, peking, korea, british government, china proper, united states, chinese town, chinese authority, chinese territory, chinese new year, chinese literature, chapter, english, chinese family, chinese army, korean government, japanese people, chinese troops, chinese trade, chinese manner, chinese general, chinese authorities, north china, h. b. m., great britain, european, england, east india company, chinese system, chinese secretary, chinese population, chinese official, chinese emperor, chinese customs, chinese custom, southern china, shanghai, koreans, japanese minister

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 chinese, and The aborigines of northern Formosa: a paper read before the North China branch of the Royal Asiatic society, Shanghai, 18th June, 1874 by Edward C. Taintor ... 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:

chinese, china, great - The Chinese repository. v.2
chinese, great, time - Travels in north and central China;
chinese, long, god - Flora hongkongensis: a description of the flowering plants and ferns of the island of Hongkong. By George Bentham. Published under the authority of Her Majesty''s secretary of state for the colonies
la, le, piculs - La France en Chine au dix-huitième siècle; documents inédits publiés sur les manuscrits conservés au dépot des affaires étrangères avec une introduction et des notes. Tome I.
government, japanese, foreign - Foreign relations of the United States : diplomatic papers Department of State, United States of America 1931/1941:suppl.:Japan:v.1:c.2

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?":

time, people, men, day, years, country, year, man, part, place, trade, city, way, number, government, work, name, river, order, life, water, officers, side, others, days, miles, land, course, house, feet, case, one, state, world, war, language, province, tea, fact, word, foreigners, ship, character, power, head, point, tion, emperor, means, nothing

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, be, are, have, were, had, been, has, being, made, do, said, having, found, called, see, make, given, did, taken, come, take, came, seen, sent, give, used, received, brought, go, say, took, left, known, put, find, ing, done, does, following, according, went, know, passed, carried, let, become, am, placed

Proper Nouns

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

China, Chinese, Mr., Canton, Japan, God, Government, M., de, Peking, S., H., Shanghai, Dr., Hongkong, E., c., United, W., Korea, ., Japanese, States, C., J., Macao, English, la, India, England, Rev., hien, General, le, Europe, Foreign, New, N., Society, Great, Hong, Hk, CHINA, East, Shin, June, July, London, Sir, B.

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, he, they, we, i, them, its, our, him, my, her, you, us, me, she, your, themselves, himself, itself, one, myself, ourselves, herself, thy, yourself, yours, thee, mine, theirs, ours, s, ex-, ye, des-, him-, be-, withal, our-, thither, em, ya, u, thyself, pos-, hers, yon, evi-, aught

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, chinese, great, many, same, such, first, foreign, few, more, large, little, small, own, good, last, new, several, japanese, present, long, british, high, much, old, whole, general, native, common, short, different, various, public, most, certain, able, imperial, second, true, latter, full, next, necessary, former, only, important, numerous, best, korean, american

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

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.