Distant Reader - subject-courtship-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 4 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 221,644 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 55,411 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 95. 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:

much, will, shall, may, love, madam, one, self, yet, since, letter, sir, now, make, great, man, know, world, thing, time, de, think, must, though, ever, well, good, lord, see, never, take, let, give, things, made, song, tell, come, say, like, without, lady, many, nothing, day, monsieur, person, thought, heart, honour

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Letters of affaires love and courtship. Written to several persons of honour and quality; / by the exquisite pen of Monsieur de Voiture, a member of the famous French Academy established at Paris by Cardinall de Richelieu. English''d by J.D., The New academy of complements erected for ladies, gentlewomen, courtiers, gentlemen, scholars, souldiers, citizens, country-men, and all persons, of what degree soever, of both sexes : stored with variety of courtly and civil complements, eloquent letters of love and friendship : with an exact collection of the newest and choicest songs à la mode, both amorous and jovial / compiled by the most refined wits of this age., and The Scotch wedding: or, A short and pretty way of wooing. When as complexions do agree, and all things they are fitting; why should the time prolonged be, be quick and mind your knitting. To a new northern tune, much us''d at the theatres. With allowance..

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

monsieur de, must needs, mademoiselle de, de rambouillet, mean time, madam de, long since, one day, must confesse, de la, let us, shall never, good fortune, must confess, will never, shall ever, lord cardinal, early english, english books, humbly beseech, de balzac, will make, much troubled, every day, will needs, make use, books online, shall make, many things, may easily, de chaudebonne, will give, long time, humble servant, will find, well acquainted, much pleasure, world affords, dear madam, come hither, madame de, de longueville, much reason, till now, may say, lord duke, dare assure, text creation, may well, much beyond

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Letters of affaires love and courtship. Written to several persons of honour and quality; / by the exquisite pen of Monsieur de Voiture, a member of the famous French Academy established at Paris by Cardinall de Richelieu. English''d by J.D. The Scotch wedding: or, A short and pretty way of wooing. When as complexions do agree, and all things they are fitting; why should the time prolonged be, be quick and mind your knitting. To a new northern tune, much us''d at the theatres. With allowance., and The New academy of complements erected for ladies, gentlewomen, courtiers, gentlemen, scholars, souldiers, citizens, country-men, and all persons, of what degree soever, of both sexes : stored with variety of courtly and civil complements, eloquent letters of love and friendship : with an exact collection of the newest and choicest songs à la mode, both amorous and jovial / compiled by the most refined wits of this age..

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, vertue, sir, sea, madam, love, letter, lady, ladies, king, court, world, virgin, tom, time, thy, thing, sun, st., spaniards, soul, song, servant, self, rambouillet, queen, princesse, person, paris, nature, monsieur, mistriss, master, mary, man, majesty, mademoiselle, lovers, lordship, lord, like, honor, hath, great, good, george, gentleman, friendship, friend, france

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 shall, and Loyal constancy; or, the seamans love-letter written by John Blay on board the Henry and Elizabeth riding at Leghorn, to his dear mistris Mary Foart, now living near Wapping, exhorting her to continue in her wonted love and constancy according to their mutual promises past between them, in order to their happy union and marriage, as soon as he shall return from this voyage to England. Tune of, Cloris full of harmless thoughts; Jenny Gin. The fair one let me in. 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?":

self, man, thing, time, love, things, world, nothing, t, day, person, heart, letter, part, affection, hath, place, life, men, honour, eyes, way, letters, reason, others, friend, pleasure, one, passion, death, rest, night, hands, occasion, power, soul, thoughts, word, joy, words, mind, servant, satisfaction, doth, wit, friendship, persons, favour, opinion, fear

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:

have, be, is, are, am, had, was, do, were, been, make, know, think, see, take, let, give, made, tell, say, come, ''s, being, did, love, thought, done, write, find, having, hath, put, said, believe, go, assure, taken, wish, seen, needs, speak, imagine, leave, pleas''d, found, dare, sent, given, send, live

Proper Nouns

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

madam, sir, lord, letter, hath, song, de, lady, monsieur, c., thou, j, ●, world, fortune, love, mademoiselle, paris, le, lover, madame, france, heaven, 〉, t, beauty, st., rambouillet, ◊, la, gentleman, mistriss, king, tcp, 〈, ladies, sea, court, c, cap, dear, lovers, vertue, sun, george, master, verie, e''re, te, kinde

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, you, it, my, me, your, her, he, his, they, she, we, them, him, their, our, us, thy, yours, thee, mine, themselves, himself, its, ''s, one, ours, hers, theirs, l, ''em, herself, ye, whereof, s, à, em, yesterdaie, vvith, vvhat, ts, t, pris''ners, non, ne, nay, myself, limb''d, haste, haply

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?"

much, great, other, more, good, such, same, own, many, little, fair, greater, greatest, old, new, least, excellent, pleased, able, last, first, better, certain, true, best, happy, confident, young, full, small, long, strange, ill, free, humble, pleasant, high, poor, most, extraordinary, mean, noble, sweet, glad, satisfied, whole, dead, wise, present, guilty

not, so, then, more, now, much, as, ever, most, never, well, yet, very, here, too, up, still, out, there, away, therefore, once, only, long, far, no, indeed, certainly, in, onely, even, again, rather, thus, also, down, all, extreamly, enough, sometimes, easily, hence, together, over, often, soon, just, better, at, longer

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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