Distant Reader - subject-baptism-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 35 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,953,201 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 55,805 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:

god, baptism, christ, church, may, yet, one, will, faith, baptized, infants, us, say, therefore, men, must, shall, now, mr, also, spirit, man, holy, first, children, much, covenant, though, water, things, true, many, doth, without, well, word, made, thing, saith, make, gospel, persons, lord, way, non, truth, time, viz, good, come

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Baby-baptism meer babism, or, An answer to nobody in five words to every-body who finds himself concern''d in''t by Samuel Fisher., Certain disputations of right to sacraments, and the true nature of visible Christianity defending them against several sorts of opponents, especially against the second assault of that pious, reverend and dear brother Mr. Thomas Blake / by Richard Baxter ..., and Anabaptism routed: or, a survey of the controverted points: Concerning [brace] 1. Infant-Baptisme. 2. Pretended necessity of dipping. 3. The dangerous practise of re-baptising. Together, with a particular answer to all that is alledged in favour of the Anabaptists, by Dr. Jer. Taylor, in his book, called, the liberty of Prophesying. / By John Reading, B.D. and sometimes student of Magdalen-Hall in Oxford..

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

holy ghost, roman non, holy spirit, visible church, jesus christ, saving faith, new testament, lords supper, must needs, every one, lord jesus, let us, water baptism, reverend author, little children, early english, english books, christ jesus, tell us, true church, christian religion, man may, justifying faith, may see, old testament, tells us, believing parents, infant baptism, books online, one thing, dying infants, good conscience, god made, fleshly seed, believers infants, full communion, one baptism, whole body, spiritual seed, god will, baptized believers, one spirit, ye shall, one body, one another, much less, little ones, gods covenant, made disciples, thing signified

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are A treatise concerning baptism, and the Lord''s Supper shewing, that the true disciples of Christ are sent to baptize men into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, for the carrying on of which, Christ is with them, and will be, to the end of the world : also, a few words concerning the Lord''s Supper, shewing that those that sup with him are in his kingdom. A sigh for peace, or, The cause of division discovered wherein the great Gospel promise of the Holy Ghost, and the doctrine of prayer with imposition of hands, as the way ordained of God to seek for it, is asserted and vindicated, as the interest and duty of Christs disciples in general : in answer to a book intituled A search for schism / by Tho. Grantham ..., and A proclamation, against penny-weddings.

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:

god, christ, baptism, church, spirit, lord, gospel, holy, covenant, infants, law, water, faith, scripture, christian, sacrament, gods, ghost, children, churches, argument, acts, world, tcp, supper, saviour, roman, parents, mr., life, iohn, father, cor, blood, apostles, apostle, act, word, son, scriptures, saints, repentance, ordinance, nations, mat, man, grace, england, disciples, communion

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 god, and The pious communicant rightly prepar''d, or, A discourse concerning the Blessed Sacrament wherein the nature of it is described, our obligation to frequent communion enforced, and directions given for due preparation for it, behaviour at, and after it, and profiting by it : with prayers and hymns, suited to the several parts of that holy office : to which is added, a short discourse of baptism / by Samuel Wesley ... 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?":

baptism, faith, infants, men, things, man, children, thing, way, time, words, word, viz, truth, persons, part, water, reason, t, scripture, people, church, others, sin, believers, nothing, place, name, self, none, end, hands, seed, world, doth, hath, p., body, sense, argument, life, death, selves, members, promise, parents, day, grace, case, sins

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, have, was, were, do, baptized, had, say, being, did, said, been, made, make, come, see, know, believe, take, give, let, called, done, prove, baptize, according, given, put, think, concerning, hath, receive, received, find, answer, am, speak, deny, having, born, go, doth, ''s, came, commanded, laying, set, saved

Proper Nouns

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

god, christ, 〉, ◊, 〈, baptism, church, mr., c., spirit, covenant, lord, holy, gospel, hath, ●, faith, water, yea, i., law, pag, e., gods, christs, thou, paul, jesus, iohn, christian, abraham, john, cor, ghost, apostles, christians, act, infants, heaven, ye, father, sacrament, grace, world, rom, men, word, dr., apostle, churches

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, they, he, his, i, them, you, their, we, our, him, your, us, my, me, himself, themselves, its, thy, her, thee, she, theirs, one, ours, yours, ye, mine, vnto, ''s, vp, ''em, itself, l, †, myself, whereof, ts, non, us''d, em, ●, whosoever, s, ay, urg''d, sanctificās, ourselves, in''t, hers

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?"

such, other, same, true, many, own, more, great, good, first, much, little, non, -, whole, holy, visible, roman, outward, least, saith, necessary, old, new, very, particular, false, present, spiritual, capable, second, last, better, common, certain, plain, former, greater, most, full, like, evident, doth, few, sufficient, right, several, proper, general, able

not, so, then, therefore, as, now, also, yet, more, only, well, here, onely, thus, much, never, up, first, ever, even, very, again, all, most, out, indeed, too, far, there, at, on, that, else, is, thereof, in, together, rather, before, down, no, away, still, off, once, forth, further, truly, secondly, plainly

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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