Distant Reader - subject-ballads-freebo

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 2021-05-24 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 256 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 502,031 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 1,961 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 92. 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:

text, tcp, english, will, eebo, tei, texts, early, books, good, now, encoded, characters, love, tune, online, phase, xml, image, partnership, oxford, one, encoding, may, shall, man, doth, make, page, images, transcribed, markup, works, work, new, edition, men, like, project, creation, based, available, keying, proquest, take, true, first, made, elements, time

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are God''s great and vvonderful vvork in Somerset-shire the charitable farmer miraculously rewarded h[a]ppening at Welling within three miles of the city of Wells this last harvest, where an honest Godly farmer having sold most part of this last summer and winter great quantities of corn to the poor in their distress at five or six shillings the bushel, when the market price was ten and eleven shillings; for which he was much derided and scoft at by his rich neighbours, he was recompensed by an extraordinary crop of wheat, the like was never before heard; of each stalk of straw having divers full large ears, some nine, ten and thirteen, but generally ten ears on every straw throughout the field which was ten acres and upwards; of which ears are to be seen at divers coffy-houses by the Royal Exchange, and at other places in London, published as a grateful acknowledgement to the goodness of providence, and to stir up all into faith in God, and charity towards their poor neighbours from the consideration of so remarkable an example. The tune i, Pretty Kate of Edenborough: being a new Scotch song, sung to the King at Windsor., and Westminster-drollery, or, A choice collection of the newest songs & poems both at court and theaters by a person of quality ; with additions..

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

english books, early english, books online, creation partnership, text creation, page images, image sets, represented either, characters represented, tcp schema, th century, markup reviewed, image set, without asking, bit group, iv tiff, asking permission, xml conversion, commercial purposes, financial support, encoded edition, institutions providing, work described, text transcribed, tcp assigned, tiff page, creative commons, batch review, proquest page, encoded text, providing financial, images scanned, online text, pfs batch, page image, will never, mona logarbo, gap elements, eng ballads, now take, title published, will remain, issued variously, converting tcp, editorial teams, keying companies, print record, create accurately, within braces, facilitate morpho

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The lamentation of Mr. Pages wife of Plimouth who being forced to wed against her will, did consent to his murther, for the love of George Strangwidge, for which fact they suffered death at Barstable in Devonshire. The tune is, Fortune my foe. The Dutch-miller, and new invented wind-miller, or, An exact description of a rare artist newly come into England who undertake[illegible] to grind all sorts of women; whether old, decriped, wrinckled, blear-eyed, long nosed, blind, lame, scold [illegible]alous, angry, poor, or all others whatsoever: he''l ingage they shall come out of his mill, young, active, ple[ea]nt, handsome, wise, modest, loving, kind and rich, without any defect, or deformity, and just suitable to th[ei]r husbands humours, and dispositions, as he hath often experienced in other countries where he hath m[a]de practice of his art. The rich for money, and the poor for nothing. Tune of, Cook La[illegible]rel, &c. Then bring your wives unto my mill, and young for old you shall have still., and The Geneva ballad To the tune of 48..

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:

tcp, english, early, love, king, good, lord, lady, tei, thee, stc, phillis, new, man, london, doe, betty, ale, tobias, thomason, strangwidge, soule, sonne, sir, sea, scotch, queene, old, money, lovers, kate, finis, england, edward, cooper, city, celia, yarow, wood, woman, william, wife, white, wheelband, vintener, tush, tune, token, time, thy

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 text, and The Taunton maids delight, or, Hey for the honest woosted-comber. In Taunton town a maid doth dwell, who loves a woosted-comber very well, in the praise of him she doth declare, no other tradesman can with him compare. All sweethe [sic] arts that doth come she does refuse, only a woosted-comber she doth chuse, to him she wisheth good prosperity, for ''tis a comber must her husband be. The tune is, I have a good old mother at home, &c. / T.L. 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:

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?":

text, texts, characters, books, xml, image, tune, images, page, man, works, work, edition, keying, eebo, men, elements, project, encoding, data, time, heart, love, users, purposes, markup, day, mind, title, t, sets, selection, schema, instances, guidelines, editions, doth, life, wife, part, changes, death, century, author, none, reason, transcription, microfilm, l, terms

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, did, were, have, are, encoded, been, do, had, make, based, take, made, ''s, come, let, -, see, published, create, created, represented, marked, corrected, say, am, know, sent, according, came, being, le, meet, use, bear, performed, described, said, asking, love, co, scanned, reviewed, providing, owned, modified, distributed, copied

Proper Nouns

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

tcp, english, text, tei, eebo, oxford, thou, c., proquest, phase, partnership, creation, 〉, london, transcribed, online, michigan, king, utf-8, unicode, p5, ncbel, 〈, printed, ◊, doe, god, p., lord, stc, commons, books, university, new, library, ballads, iv, universal, tiff, qc, keyed, creative, batch, eng, england, ●, sampled, tune, thomas, le

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, my, he, his, her, you, their, me, they, she, it, we, him, your, our, thy, them, thee, us, ''s, l, themselves, himself, mine, ''em, its, one, vp, yours, ye, ay, pelf, nay, herself, em, vvith, trye, myself, thou, s, ourselves, ours, ile, ha''y, zelf, yt, youngmen, yf, yeu, yee

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?"

early, good, english, available, true, such, first, other, new, general, illegible, great, many, second, young, old, own, more, same, textual, 17th, sweet, keyboarded, financial, due, commercial, original, large, greater, clear, light, subject, wide, possible, fair, external, aware, anonymous, pleasant, critical, usual, syntactic, structural, readable, quality, public, overall, monographic, lossless, later

then, not, so, now, therefore, never, online, thus, out, still, away, here, very, more, well, in, most, sometimes, even, above, too, as, there, yet, over, down, up, notably, variously, usually, respectfully, mainly, accurately, no, all, ever, long, much, once, first, again, together, else, alone, soon, quite, off, home, forth, only

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.