Distant Reader - subject-congregationalism-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 14 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 523,659 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 37,404 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 90. 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:

church, god, may, one, christ, will, mr, churches, men, power, yet, things, must, lord, though, true, people, first, us, man, also, now, shall, say, doth, word, many, onely, good, without, much, therefore, place, make, thing, ministers, way, yea, vnto, like, holy, answer, truth, might, congregation, words, well, others, made, even

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are A iustification of separation from the Church of England Against Mr Richard Bernard his invective, intituled; The separatists schisme. By Iohn Robinson., A reply to Mr. Rutherfurd, or A defence of the answer to Reverend Mr. Herles booke against the independency of churches. VVherein such objections and answers, as are returned to sundry passages in the said answer by Mr. Samuel Rutherfurd, a godly and learned brother of the Church of Scotland, in his boke entituled The due right of Presbyters, are examined and removed, and the answer justified and cleared. / By Richard Macher [sic] teacher to the church at Dorchester in New England. 1646., and An husbandmans harrow to pull down the ridges of the presbyteriall government and to smooth, a little, the independent ... containing divers new and unanswerable arguments ... / written by Ellis Bradshavv ....

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

visible church, true church, holy ghost, whole church, jesus christ, nationall church, lord iesus, must needs, roman non, new testament, reformed churches, let us, particular church, reverend author, one place, one church, lord jesus, lords supper, every one, one congregation, holy things, particular churches, early english, english books, excellent things, much lesse, true churches, books online, gathered together, iesus christ, every man, come together, one thing, god will, early works, true visible, gods word, mr bernard, true matter, man may, catholick church, yea though, church may, single congregation, will say, apostle paul, page images, first born, old testament, generall councell

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are To his reverend and much respected good friend, Mr. John Goodwin: be these I pray presented. The schismatick sifted. Or, The picture of Independents, freshly and fairly washt-over again. Wherein, the sectaries of these times (I mean, the principall seducers to that dangerous and subtile schisme of Independency) are with their own proper pensils, and self-mixed colours, most lively set forth to be a generation of notorious dissemblers and sly deceivers. Collected (for the most part) from undeniable testimonies under their own hands, in print; for the more fair and full satisfaction, and undeceiving of moderate and much misled Christians; especially by the outward appearance of their piety of life, and a pretence of their preaching sound-doctrine. / By John Vicars., and Independency examined, vnmasked, refuted, by twelve new particular interrogatories: detecting both the manifold absurdities, inconveniences that must necessarily attend it, to the great disturbance of church, state, the diminution, subversion of the lawfull undoubted power of all christian magistrates, parliaments, synods: and shaking the chiefe pillars, wherwith its patrons would support it. / By William Prynne of Lincolnes Inne, Esquier..

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:

church, churches, lord, god, christ, cor, word, scripture, independent, government, england, elders, christian, apostle, act, world, spirit, roman, parliament, page, new, mr., law, gods, english, brother, assembly, william, truth, thing, tcp, synod, soul, sectaries, scriptures, schisme, saints, sacraments, rutherford, romish, rom, reverend, psal, prynn, prophets, presence, presbyterian, preists, praises, power

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 church, and A review of the true nature of schisme, with a vindication of the Congregationall churches in England, from the imputation thereof unjustly charged on them by Mr D. Cawdrey, preacher of the Word at Billing in Northampton-shire. / By John Owen D.D. 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?":

men, things, power, people, church, man, thing, place, churches, way, word, words, others, truth, part, persons, officers, scriptures, reason, body, members, matter, hath, world, doth, office, government, hands, faith, ▪, ministers, scripture, book, day, order, time, self, end, nothing, respect, name, none, case, work, hand, answer, person, brother, nature, children

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, were, do, was, had, say, being, make, did, been, made, let, come, see, take, know, said, called, prove, given, done, according, set, speak, am, give, hath, vnto, having, think, taken, answer, put, deny, gathered, found, doth, follow, hold, makes, consider, bring, suppose, call, teach, spoken, read

Proper Nouns

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

church, god, christ, lord, mr, b., churches, hath, c., 〉, cor, yea, heaven, 〈, ◊, pag, england, ●, mr., congregation, act, ministers, lords, gods, apostles, thou, elders, spirit, apostle, paul, christs, minister, holy, chap, wee, rome, iesus, independents, synods, rom, christians, ministery, christian, rutherford, word, jesus, doe, mat, king, israel

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, i, he, them, his, their, you, we, our, him, your, us, my, themselves, me, himself, her, its, thy, thee, she, ours, theirs, one, †, vp, mine, yours, vnto, yourself, ye, ourselves, givē, yee, whereof, s, herself, hers, em, ''em, 〈, y, wil, vvhat, ty, sōe, severall, reformatiō, oft

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?"

other, such, true, same, many, good, own, first, more, whole, particular, great, much, holy, visible, false, new, former, least, like, most, very, godly, christian, present, last, greater, old, few, doth, wicked, second, necessary, common, private, little, ordinary, sundry, non, -, full, best, roman, contrary, lawfull, sufficient, next, better, saith, right

not, so, then, also, now, more, onely, therefore, yet, as, most, even, here, thus, well, first, together, out, never, all, only, there, much, ever, up, very, †, indeed, at, in, alone, thereof, rather, too, otherwise, still, far, down, forth, once, no, lastly, before, further, else, away, therein, formerly, secondly, especially

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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