Distant Reader - subject-demonology-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 1,253,255 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 125,325 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 93. 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:

god, may, one, will, men, man, yet, also, shall, things, great, doth, first, many, power, made, must, say, spirit, good, like, saith, satan, make, christ, therefore, time, us, now, spirits, much, place, though, haue, witches, words, might, others, see, true, holy, devil, without, thing, chap, way, hand, lord, called, thereof

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Demonologia sacra, or, A treatise of Satan''s temptations in three parts / by Richard Gilpin., The discovery of witchcraft proving that the compacts and contracts of witches with devils and all infernal spirits or familiars are but erroneous novelties and imaginary conceptions : also discovering, how far their power extendeth in killing, tormenting, consuming, or curing the bodies of men, women, children, or animals by charms, philtres, periapts, pentacles, curses, and conjurations : wherein likewise the unchristian practices and inhumane dealings of searchers and witch-tryers upon aged, melancholly, and superstitious people, in extorting confessions by terrors and tortures, and in devising false marks and symptoms, are notably detected ... : in sixteen books / by Reginald Scot ... ; whereunto is added an excellent Discourse of the nature and substance of devils and spirits, in two books : the first by the aforesaid author, the second now added in this third edition ... conducing to the compleating of the whole work, with nine chapters at the beginning of the fifteenth [sic] book of The discovery., and Scot''s Discovery of vvitchcraft proving the common opinions of witches contracting with divels, spirits, or familiars ... to be but imaginary, erronious conceptions and novelties : wherein also, the lewde unchristian all written and published in anno 1584, by Reginald Scot, Esquire..

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

actuall possession, holy ghost, holy spirit, jesus christ, must needs, vnto vs, let us, let vs, right hand, shall see, left hand, may see, long since, shall find, young man, lord jesus, many times, true naturall, many things, possessed mans, old women, one day, set forth, nothing else, holy water, good angels, times past, every one, mean time, roman non, tells us, one thing, man may, every thing, many others, will make, abraham fleming, another place, great many, taken away, meere naturall, lord god, put downe, take away, miraculous actions, early english, english books, satan doth, will say, one god

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are A true relation of an apparition expressions and actings of a spirit which infected the house of Andrew Mackie in Ring-Croft of Stocking, in the paroch of Kerrick, in the stewartry of Kirkcudbright, in Scotland / by Mr. Alexander Telfair, minister of that paroch ; and attested by many other persons who were also eye and ear-witnesses. The discovery of witchcraft proving that the compacts and contracts of witches with devils and all infernal spirits or familiars are but erroneous novelties and imaginary conceptions : also discovering, how far their power extendeth in killing, tormenting, consuming, or curing the bodies of men, women, children, or animals by charms, philtres, periapts, pentacles, curses, and conjurations : wherein likewise the unchristian practices and inhumane dealings of searchers and witch-tryers upon aged, melancholly, and superstitious people, in extorting confessions by terrors and tortures, and in devising false marks and symptoms, are notably detected ... : in sixteen books / by Reginald Scot ... ; whereunto is added an excellent Discourse of the nature and substance of devils and spirits, in two books : the first by the aforesaid author, the second now added in this third edition ... conducing to the compleating of the whole work, with nine chapters at the beginning of the fifteenth [sic] book of The discovery., and Scot''s Discovery of vvitchcraft proving the common opinions of witches contracting with divels, spirits, or familiars ... to be but imaginary, erronious conceptions and novelties : wherein also, the lewde unchristian all written and published in anno 1584, by Reginald Scot, 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:

god, lord, church, spirit, man, holy, christ, tcp, son, scriptures, lady, king, ghost, devil, witch, time, spirits, satan, power, house, great, gods, father, doctrine, chap, book, body, augustine, art, angels, worship, world, word, water, vii, truth, sun, stars, starres, saul, sauiour, saints, roman, religion, reason, prophet, priest, pride, planets, people

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 god, and Scot''s Discovery of vvitchcraft proving the common opinions of witches contracting with divels, spirits, or familiars ... to be but imaginary, erronious conceptions and novelties : wherein also, the lewde unchristian all written and published in anno 1584, by Reginald Scot, Esquire. 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?":

things, man, men, power, time, place, words, others, thing, way, hand, witches, doth, day, nothing, body, spirits, matter, nature, part, t, selfe, name, reason, hath, death, cap, truth, art, word, life, end, world, purpose, bodies, people, miracles, manner, none, spirit, diuels, times, heart, opinion, night, witch, fire, mind, possession, scripture

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, was, have, were, had, do, being, said, made, say, make, did, been, see, called, come, take, let, know, put, done, concerning, according, hath, give, came, set, brought, found, think, go, doth, haue, thought, am, find, cast, bring, taken, having, tell, used, read, call, seem, shew, written, hold

Proper Nouns

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

god, 〉, ◊, 〈, c., satan, christ, thou, hath, lord, spirit, devil, chap, lib, de, men, angels, spirits, holy, ●, haue, man, s., ✚, doe, pag, world, ibid, gods, father, king, verie, mans, church, heaven, bodin, yea, lycanthropus, mal, est, son, devils, power, i., owne, earth, physiologus, moses, jesus, witches

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?"

he, it, his, they, their, i, them, him, you, we, our, her, your, she, my, me, us, themselves, himself, thy, thee, its, one, vp, theirs, mine, ye, ours, vnto, hers, ''s, yours, whereof, herself, non, ♓, thou, itself, ●, whosoever, th, ne, gods, elias, 〈, tollit, s, p, mel, ♀

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?"

such, other, great, many, same, good, true, more, first, own, much, little, old, saith, strange, certain, holy, common, whole, false, like, last, least, most, able, present, very, second, greater, dead, wise, full, former, new, doth, proper, better, high, best, natural, miraculous, third, wicked, strong, small, long, several, right, poor, young

not, so, then, also, more, therefore, now, yet, thus, up, as, most, only, out, very, first, thereof, much, rather, onely, well, there, sometimes, never, all, here, away, before, still, down, indeed, else, far, long, too, at, otherwise, even, together, therein, again, no, thereby, further, off, forth, ever, in, secondly, often

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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