Distant Reader - subject-booksellersAndBookselling-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 2021-05-25 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 8 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 137,373 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 17,171 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 81. 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:

mr, will, one, dublin, great, much, may, shall, man, self, yet, good, first, think, now, madam, never, say, must, well, make, see, ireland, books, time, world, house, patrick, give, made, know, thing, character, letter, men, therefore, many, gentlemen, find, sir, like, god, next, two, little, take, every, friend, though, person

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The Dublin scuffle being a challenge sent by John Dunton, citizen of London, to Patrick Campbel, bookseller in Dublin : together with small skirmishes of bills and advertisements : to which is added the billet doux sent him by a citizens wife in Dublin, tempting him to lewdness, with his answers to her : also some account of his conversation in Ireland, intermixt with particular characters of the most eminent persons he convers''d with in that kingdom ... : in several letters to the spectators of this scuffle, with a poem on the whole encounter., Proposals for printing by subscription, Bibliotheca patrum, or, A new ecclesiastical history, and There is now in the press, a geographical discription of England, Scotland, and Ireland, with the isles thereto belonging: which in a compendious method treateth of such things that are most necessary to be known, and as yet hath not been treated of by any author ....

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

patrick campbel, dublin scuffle, english books, early english, summer ramble, john dunton, books online, second spira, must needs, creation partnership, text creation, every thing, billet doux, humble servant, page images, must say, tcp schema, three auctions, characters represented, represented either, tell ye, image sets, good man, one another, may say, great deal, every one, lord mayor, second letter, sir henry, friend mr, du pin, may see, reverend mr, whole life, iohn dunton, shall say, send ye, will find, will never, every day, told ye, good books, patrick campbell, every man, will give, great humility, may well, whole world, richard wilde

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The Dublin scuffle being a challenge sent by John Dunton, citizen of London, to Patrick Campbel, bookseller in Dublin : together with small skirmishes of bills and advertisements : to which is added the billet doux sent him by a citizens wife in Dublin, tempting him to lewdness, with his answers to her : also some account of his conversation in Ireland, intermixt with particular characters of the most eminent persons he convers''d with in that kingdom ... : in several letters to the spectators of this scuffle, with a poem on the whole encounter. Advertisement to booksellers. Whereas the Four Oxford Cullies ..., and There is now in the press, a geographical discription of England, Scotland, and Ireland, with the isles thereto belonging: which in a compendious method treateth of such things that are most necessary to be known, and as yet hath not been treated of by any author ....

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, county, church, world, wilde, wife, truth, time, thoughts, table, sir, second, scuffle, room, psalmes, place, person, paul, patrick, mr., men, man, madam, lord, life, letter, lady, ireland, house, honour, god, gentlemen, friend, dunton, dublin, dorinda, council, conversation, company, character, campbel, books, auction, account

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 mr, and There is now in the press, a geographic description of England, Scotland, and Ireland, with the isles thereto belonging which in a compendious method treateth of such things that are most necessary to be known, and as yet hath not been treated of by any author. 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?":

t, self, man, thing, time, nothing, tho, way, friend, person, things, day, books, others, part, reason, mind, auction, wou''d, letter, life, gentlemen, text, work, characters, place, one, men, leave, name, none, conversation, texts, scuffle, cou''d, enemies, death, author, eyes, truth, sale, occasion, body, works, something, end, ▪, years, servant, people

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, have, was, had, are, do, am, were, has, been, ''s, think, being, say, make, see, give, made, know, did, said, having, find, take, told, found, come, thought, sent, done, given, tell, went, meet, go, came, believe, send, seen, gave, hope, left, live, call, took, met, makes, leave, heard

Proper Nouns

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

mr., dublin, madam, patrick, ireland, world, house, god, sir, character, man, campbel, tcp, london, dorinda, men, ●, st., account, dunton, books, 〉, england, church, ◊, wife, letter, lord, gentlemen, ye, scuffle, council, gentleman, book, persons, c., wilde, lady, honour, 〈, vertue, dr., dick, john, oxford, english, ramble, new, great, bishop

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, you, it, he, his, your, me, him, they, their, her, we, she, ''em, our, them, us, himself, themselves, its, thy, ye, thee, em, one, yours, mine, theirs, l, ha, surpriz''d, shou''d, s, oblig''d, hers, ha''e, discours''d, ''s

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, other, own, such, good, much, more, first, many, little, true, same, last, several, next, best, better, whole, large, honest, particular, second, generous, few, fair, sure, old, present, humble, happy, least, general, early, ready, able, very, proper, enough, ill, new, necessary, less, short, greatest, english, poor, long, ingenious, common, ramble

not, so, as, very, then, now, never, n''t, here, well, more, much, therefore, too, only, ever, yet, most, out, perhaps, up, thus, also, far, still, there, over, again, just, first, enough, even, rather, often, however, no, in, always, once, long, off, indeed, else, all, together, soon, especially, next, further, formerly

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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