subject-afghanWars-gutenberg

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 2021-05-31 by Eric Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>. The carrel was created using the Distant Reader gutenberg process, and the input was the result of a query applied to a local mirror of Project Gutenberg -- facet_subject:"Afghan Wars". Then, for future reference, the results were saved to a Zip file complete with rudimentary bibliographics. The name of the file is input-file.zip. The Zip file was then unpacked and the contents saved to a cache as well as a directory 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 8 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 522,554 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 65,319 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 68. 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:

will, one, general, men, two, th, time, british, great, force, troops, made, cabul, army, now, sir, us, day, however, afghan, officers, well, first, left, country, place, way, enemy, position, three, may, long, fire, afghans, camp, march, guns, many, shah, candahar, man, found, came, might, little, india, sent, angus, chief, much

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are To Herat and Cabul: A Story of the First Afghan War, For Name and Fame; Or, Through Afghan Passes, and Recollections of a Military Life.

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

dost mahomed, crown vo, shah soojah, page illustrations, lord raglan, sir john, british government, akbar khan, british troops, native infantry, horse artillery, lord auckland, british army, olivine edges, balla hissar, general roberts, central asia, camp followers, next day, next morning, shere ali, sir alexander, british force, two days, th regiment, following day, john keane, th light, william gale, took place, alexander burnes, general sir, many years, sir frederick, fell back, general willshire, shah shooja, runjeet singh, afghan war, left behind, main body, first place, three days, sir henry, opened fire, good deal, english officers, frederick roberts, greater part, one day

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are To Herat and Cabul: A Story of the First Afghan War The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80, and The First Afghan War.

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:

british, sir, khan, india, general, candahar, cabul, ameer, shah, soojah, mahomed, macnaghten, lord, dost, colonel, captain, afghanistan, roberts, mr., majesty, infantry, indus, illustration, government, ghuznee, english, bombay, akbar, afghans, yossouf, william, war, shooja, sherpur, september, sebastopol, sadut, russian, russia, ripon, raglan, pélissier, pottinger, persian, peiwar, ordnance, november, minister, malays, major

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 general, and The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 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:

1. said - To Herat and Cabul: A Story of the First Afghan War
2. general - The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80
3. hesitating - Indian Frontier Policy; an historical sketch

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:

1. said, time, men - Recollections of a Military Life
2. men, said, enemy - For Name and Fame; Or, Through Afghan Passes
3. cabul, british, general - The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80
4. general, day, army - Campaign of the Indus In a Series of Letters from an Officer of the Bombay Division
5. stealing, encroachment, maharajah - Indian Frontier Policy; an historical sketch

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?":

men, time, force, troops, day, army, enemy, officers, country, way, position, place, guns, fire, man, camp, part, days, officer, morning, attack, miles, night, cavalry, people, chief, artillery, years, city, village, party, advance, ground, order, march, war, work, regiment, side, nothing, command, soldiers, water, town, column, end, road, head, hand, horse

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, were, be, is, have, been, are, said, made, do, being, has, having, found, came, sent, did, left, take, took, taken, see, make, brought, come, received, am, arrived, go, reached, carried, went, wounded, think, get, killed, give, say, passed, know, done, fell, held, heard, going, marched, became, given, told

Proper Nouns

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

general, _, cabul, sir, shah, afghans, candahar, india, angus, khan, lord, afghanistan, mahomed, dost, macnaghten, captain, ameer, colonel, herat, soojah, government, major, crown, bombay, roberts, jellalabad, england, 8vo, mr., english, british, pottinger, lieutenant, akbar, afghan, burnes, pass, bengal, march, indus, russia, ghuznee, persia, majesty, infantry, azim, john, brigadier, war, william

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?"

he, his, it, i, they, their, we, you, him, them, our, my, its, us, me, himself, your, her, themselves, she, itself, myself, ourselves, yourself, one, ours, herself, mine, yours, ''em, theirs, infantry--1, yourselves, wounded--1, thy, thee, ha, father,--i, em, ears,--you, bookshelf, bombardment

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?"

great, british, other, few, many, afghan, little, good, first, more, large, own, long, strong, several, last, full, military, old, same, small, native, english, such, able, much, whole, short, general, next, young, considerable, russian, best, necessary, heavy, present, possible, persian, open, latter, high, new, second, better, most, ready, main, difficult, certain

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

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.

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