Distant Reader - subject-currencyQuestion-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 7 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 50,033 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 7,147 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:

will, money, silver, may, trade, shall, coin, great, much, value, commodities, must, us, nation, people, one, make, gold, yet, text, english, tcp, bullion, per, made, england, time, price, now, weight, ships, also, take, first, advance, foreign, exchange, part, might, less, new, eebo, two, moneys, therefore, merchants, pay, countries, good, many

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are A discourse of the general notions of money, trade & exchanges, as they stand in relation to each other attempted by way of aphorism : with a letter to a minister of state, further explaining the aphorisms, and applying them to the present circumstances of this nation : wherein also some thoughts are suggested for the remedying the abuses of our money / by a merchant., Decus & tutamen, or, Our new money as now coined in full weight and fineness proved to be for the honour, safety and advantage of England, written by way of answer to Sir Richard Temple and Dr. Barbon ; to which is added an essay to preserve our new money from being hoarded, melted down, transported or counterfeited., and An essay towards carrying on the present war against France and other publick occasions as also for paying off all debts contracted in the same, or otherwise : and new-coyning of all our moneys, without charge to the great encrease of the honour, strength and wealth of the nation : humbly propos''d, for the Parliament''s consideration and submitted to their great wisdom and love to their country, etc. / by John Blackwell ....

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

early english, english books, per cent, books online, per ounce, copper money, creation partnership, text creation, page images, clipt money, thousand pounds, represented either, image sets, characters represented, tcp schema, new money, foreign commodities, doctor says, crown piece, will never, short time, sir richard, amongst us, running cash, broad money, homebred commodities, tiff page, encoded text, asking permission, work described, natural value, bit group, text transcribed, commercial purposes, counterfeit money, providing financial, encoded edition, image set, institutions providing, markup reviewed, full weight, batch review, pfs batch, tcp assigned, will appear, creative commons, currency question, financial support, online text, images scanned

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are A proclamation for raising the rate of money. Decus & tutamen, or, Our new money as now coined in full weight and fineness proved to be for the honour, safety and advantage of England, written by way of answer to Sir Richard Temple and Dr. Barbon ; to which is added an essay to preserve our new money from being hoarded, melted down, transported or counterfeited., and A letter from an English merchant at Amsterdam, to his friend at London, concerning the trade and coin of England.

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, trade, nation, money, commodities, value, war, silver, scotland, people, nations, moneys, land, england, doctor, countries, coin, bullion, bills

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 money, and A Cleare and evident way for enriching the nations of England and Ireland and for setting very great numbers of poore on work 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?":

money, people, silver, value, nation, time, commodities, s., text, l., price, part, gold, ships, years, t, reason, trade, texts, way, work, things, occasion, weight, others, viz, merchant, countries, goods, characters, tho, advance, nothing, books, pounds, xml, thing, country, year, images, selves, quantity, places, parts, page, men, home, d., nations, means

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, is, have, are, was, were, make, being, do, been, made, take, had, pay, has, think, brought, come, bring, paid, keep, give, ''s, sold, encoded, done, carry, put, having, buy, prevent, send, did, according, raising, given, set, sent, become, am, advance, taken, receive, find, carried, says, say, continue, answer, raised

Proper Nouns

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

coin, trade, money, tcp, silver, england, bullion, commodities, c., english, foreign, exchange, value, nation, gold, merchants, parliament, moneys, new, copper, weight, text, crown, east, tei, eebo, sir, publick, cent, bills, sect, london, credit, countrey, kingdom, doctor, guinea, commerce, oxford, nations, land, ballance, man, france, clipt, sea, loss, d., countries, world

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, our, their, they, i, we, them, you, his, us, he, your, my, themselves, its, me, him, himself, ours, theirs, ourselves, l, yours, whereof, us''d, thy, one, her

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, more, great, such, same, own, much, many, less, true, good, present, most, first, early, greater, english, better, worth, little, small, necessary, last, certain, general, able, whole, several, few, available, rich, full, new, due, like, least, short, natural, large, greatest, current, common, sufficient, subject, high, fine, different, possible, illegible, fit

not, so, then, as, much, out, now, only, more, also, very, therefore, in, thereof, well, never, here, yet, up, down, abroad, most, away, thus, over, thereby, no, even, too, likewise, first, again, ever, yearly, otherwise, humbly, there, far, before, on, off, especially, about, sometimes, rather, long, further, certainly, still, online

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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