Distant Reader - subject-constitutionalHistory-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 10 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,721,894 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 172,189 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 86. 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:

de, king, et, ad, kings, parliament, quod, non, per, cum, made, shall, ut, law, pope, may, vel, est, england, power, lords, commons, one, qui, popes, rex, yet, will, first, great, bishops, without, pro, time, si, church, granted, cap, men, bishop, see, quae, ecclesiae, nobis, nos, quam, henry, therefore, hoc, crown

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The first-[third] tome of an exact chronological vindication and historical demonstration of our British, Roman, Saxon, Danish, Norman, English kings supreme ecclesiastical jurisdiction from the original planting, embracing of Christian religion therein, and reign of Lucius, our first Christian king, till the death of King Richard the First, Anno Domini 1199 ... / by William Prynne, Esq., An exact abridgement of the records in the Tower of London from the reign of King Edward the Second, unto King Richard the Third, of all the Parliaments holden in each Kings reign, and the several acts in every Parliament : together with the names and titles of all the dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons, summoned to every of the said Parliaments / collected by Sir Robert Cotton ... ; revised, rectified in sundry mistakes, and supplied with a preface, marginal notes, several ommissions, and exact tables ... by William Prynne ..., and An historical and political discourse of the laws & government of England from the first times to the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth : with a vindication of the ancient way of parliaments in England : collected from some manuscript notes of John Selden, Esq. / by Nathaniel Bacon ..., Esquire..

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

print touching, king john, teste rege, rege apud, domini papae, king will, regni nostri, paris hist, king henry, super hoc, common law, ex parte, dominus papa, apud westm, letters patents, domini regis, ad hoc, dominus rex, quod si, johanni de, usque ad, et si, quod cum, domino papae, matthew paris, chief justice, holy land, great charter, hac parte, king johns, de la, sir iohn, ita quod, eo quod, vobis mandamus, rex angliae, willielmo de, ad nos, gray de, mandatum est, last parliament, sir william, great men, regno nostro, ut supra, pope innocent, et cum, per literas, quod non, domino papa

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Jani Anglorum facies nova, or, Several monuments of antiquity touching the great councils of the kingdom and the court of the kings immediate tenants and officers from the first of William the First, to the forty ninth of Henry the third, reviv''d and clear''d : wherein the sense of the common-council of the kingdom mentioned in King John''s charter, and of the laws ecclesiastical, or civil, concerning clergy-men''s voting in capital cases is submitted to the judgement of the learned. The first-[third] tome of an exact chronological vindication and historical demonstration of our British, Roman, Saxon, Danish, Norman, English kings supreme ecclesiastical jurisdiction from the original planting, embracing of Christian religion therein, and reign of Lucius, our first Christian king, till the death of King Richard the First, Anno Domini 1199 ... / by William Prynne, Esq., and An historical and political discourse of the laws & government of England from the first times to the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth : with a vindication of the ancient way of parliaments in England : collected from some manuscript notes of John Selden, Esq. / by Nathaniel Bacon ..., Esquire..

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:

parliament, king, laws, england, crown, lords, law, court, commons, realm, government, english, council, clergy, church, statute, pope, nation, liberties, kingdom, henry, edward, bishops, act, william, subjects, queen, power, people, peace, officers, majesty, kingdome, justice, ireland, house, general, earl, duke, county, charter, archbishop, angliae, york, writ, wales, tower, title, thomas, tenants

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 king, and Jani Anglorum facies nova, or, Several monuments of antiquity touching the great councils of the kingdom and the court of the kings immediate tenants and officers from the first of William the First, to the forty ninth of Henry the third, reviv''d and clear''d : wherein the sense of the common-council of the kingdom mentioned in King John''s charter, and of the laws ecclesiastical, or civil, concerning clergy-men''s voting in capital cases is submitted to the judgement of the learned. 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?":

p., ad, kings, quod, power, et, time, men, cap, others, times, people, king, day, man, persons, year, person, way, h, years, print, part, apud, e, order, m., money, matters, cases, case, answ, p, peace, writs, place, right, r, goods, ▪, title, election, things, death, assent, petitions, thing, sicut, subjects, lands

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:

be, was, is, were, had, made, have, are, said, being, granted, do, see, touching, did, concerning, been, die, make, done, according, summoned, taken, sent, take, called, given, give, confirmed, having, qui, come, put, held, enacted, set, brought, grant, declared, hold, appointed, appear, found, gave, came, pay, issued, used, elected, kept

Proper Nouns

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

king, de, et, parliament, c., cum, h., p, pope, law, england, lords, vel, est, rex, commons, e., popes, quod, kings, ●, bishops, bishop, church, ecclesiae, henry, crown, r., qui, regis, quam, nos, nec, earl, angliae, regni, council, john, duke, rome, archbishop, anno, realm, sir, ab, lord, domino, mat, paris, non

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?"

his, their, it, he, they, them, him, i, our, her, himself, themselves, we, us, its, she, my, me, you, your, theirs, thee, thy, one, non, ne, itself, whereof, em, †, ours, hers, ye, quo, diu, ''s, ●, u, severall, mine, ib, hic, eva, s, quae, nulla, ian, diversa, ce, yours

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, same, great, own, first, many, more, good, whole, certain, new, common, pro, non, much, last, next, former, present, several, full, like, old, second, late, free, due, true, sundry, general, particular, special, most, ancient, publick, little, third, high, private, better, super, large, wise, ecclesiastical, contrary, ordinary, suae, english, greater

not, so, then, therefore, now, more, as, thus, only, also, well, thereof, yet, up, onely, there, therein, first, ever, much, never, most, formerly, very, here, rather, super, out, otherwise, away, too, thereupon, together, in, especially, thereby, forth, even, before, long, likewise, further, over, quae, far, still, soon, above, sometimes, once

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.