Distant Reader - wisdom-from-harvard

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 6,014,883 words long. Each item in the study carrel is, on average, 49,709 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 79. 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, man, will, love, may, life, wisdom, good, great, things, men, god, said, like, us, world, every, time, lord, two, also, first, without, well, must, much, shall, many, made, nature, now, see, even, mind, make, never, yet, little, day, body, light, know, truth, de, thing, nothing, heaven, spiritual, way, natural

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are: 1) Wit, wisdom and foibles of the great, together with numerous anecdotes illustrative of the characters of people and their rulers ... , 2) The delights of wisdom pertaining to marriage love : after which follow the pleasures of insanity pertaining to scortatory love by Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swede; first published in Latin, Amsterdam, 1768; [translated by Samuel M. Warren]., and 3) Of wisdom : three books written originally in French by the Sieur de Charron ; with an account of the author ; made English by George Stanhope from the best edition, corrected and enlarged by the author a little before his death v.2.

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

marriage love, let us, conjugial love, every one, divine love, spiritual world, every man, united states, new york, divine wisdom, every thing, one day, like manner, natural world, young man, wise man, scortatory love, one another, true marriage, one man, one thing, man may, human nature, old age, great deal, natural man, years ago, nothing else, every day, well known, young men, will never, proverbial wisdom, wise men, christian wisdom, angelic wisdom, human life, make one, three degrees, every part, many things, sydney smith, will find, human race, good man, great epic, take place, takes place, francis bacon, will make

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are: 1) The delights of wisdom pertaining to marriage love : after which follow the pleasures of insanity pertaining to scortatory love by Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swede; first published in Latin, Amsterdam, 1768; [translated by Samuel M. Warren]., 2) Selections from Fénelon , and 3) The Occasional sermon : delivered before the Universalist General Convention, at its session in the city of New York, Sept. 1841 : together with thirteen other sermons delivered on the same occasion.

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, god, wisdom, life, good man, good, thing, great, time, lord, great man, wise man, love, like, young man, world, work, thou, soul, poor man, nature, lord god, honest man, thy, rich man, place, old man, england, wit, law, human life, death, lord jesus christ, form, divine wisdom, divine love, book, woman, water, united states, state, power, new york, mind, great men, day, chapter, word, spiritual man, proud 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 man, and The path of light rendered for the first time into English, from the Bodhicharyāvatāra of Sānti-deva, a manual of Mahayama Buddhism, by L. D. Barnett 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:

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, love, life, things, men, world, time, wisdom, mind, nature, day, body, nothing, thing, truth, way, people, heart, light, part, marriage, one, soul, death, place, others, power, state, water, hand, earth, form, order, reason, work, years, con-, words, tion, law, end, will, woman, spirit, self, wife, means, understanding, sense, use

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, be, are, was, have, had, has, were, been, do, said, made, being, see, make, know, does, let, come, take, called, did, say, think, give, given, found, go, seen, put, according, find, am, ing, hath, done, having, become, known, came, makes, taken, live, look, love, brought, concerning, set, thought, 's

Proper Nouns

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

God, Lord, heaven, Mr., thou, et, Wisdom, |, Divine, ii, WISDOM, quod, de, ., Man, II, New, John, Book, est, Sir, Job, England, Mrs., St., Nature, M., sunt, I., i., House, States, General, III, Dr., Christ, King, Life, Word, Israel, Love, Fig, n., Jesus, Philip, ut, R., theſe, ſuch, Father

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, he, his, i, they, their, we, them, you, him, its, our, her, my, us, me, she, your, himself, itself, themselves, thy, thee, one, myself, ourselves, herself, yourself, ye, thyself, mine, 'em, yours, thou, theirs, thine, ours, withal, oneself, him-, ex-, our-, isself, be-, hers, em, 's, pos-, aught, gen-

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, great, good, own, such, same, many, more, little, first, natural, spiritual, old, true, human, much, new, whole, few, wise, last, young, certain, common, general, moral, small, different, divine, better, best, full, long, present, able, large, poor, least, greater, high, most, various, right, in-, second, very, beautiful, perfect, latter, free

not, so, more, only, then, very, up, also, as, now, most, out, even, never, well, thus, too, therefore, still, ever, here, always, yet, down, much, again, far, there, away, just, often, once, all, indeed, together, off, however, n't, first, on, rather, in, long, forth, back, hence, no, soon, less, perhaps

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.