Distant Reader - subject-elections-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 19 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 84,386 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 4,441 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 84. 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:

men, tcp, lord, text, will, may, mr, one, election, eebo, right, shall, chosen, mayor, god, made, english, city, cause, now, first, time, common, parliament, people, early, tei, sir, make, therefore, man, say, every, texts, court, great, good, without, books, london, two, elections, yet, way, works, characters, us, law, encoded, must

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Londons liberties, or, A learned argument of law and reason, before the Lord Mayor, Court of Aldermen, and Common-Council, at Guild-Hall between Mr. Maynard, now the Kings eldest serjeant at law, Mr. Hales, late Lord Chief Justice of the Kings Bench, and Mr. Wilde, lately one of the justices of the same court, of council for the Livery-men of London, and Major John Wildman, and Mr. John Price, of council for the Freemen of London : wherein the freedom of the citizens of London in their elections of their mayor, sheriffs, aldermen, and common-council-men, is fully debated, their most ancient charters examined, and on both hands agreed to be but a confirmation of their former rights : with their opinions concerning the forfeiture of Londons charter., Some cautions offered to the consideration of those who are to chuse members to serve in the ensuing Parliament, and Information for Lord Basil Hamilton concerning the election of a commissioner for the barons of the shire of Wigton..

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

english books, early english, books online, lord mayor, text creation, creation partnership, page images, represented either, image sets, every ward, characters represented, early works, tcp schema, lord basil, sir eliab, sir william, common council, chief officers, will never, publisher proquest, text transcribed, two phases, lossless xml, sdata character, partnership web, quality assurance, text strings, cambridge bibliography, print record, diplomatic transcriptions, make clear, tcp aimed, tcp files, th century, keying companies, libraries guidelines, bit group, english literature, proquest page, compelling reason, encoded text, overall quality, basic encoding, strings within, textual data, online text, characters marked, twelve men, known extent, texts based

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are By the King a proclamation for the speedy calling of a Parliament. Information, for Sir John, Hall Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Robert Chiesly and James Bowdoun baillies, Sir Archibald Muir, Patrick Halyburtoun, William Meinzies, William Hutcheson, and George Stirling. Against James McLurg, George Clerk, Robert Blackwood, William Paton and others., and Information for Lord Basil Hamilton concerning the election of a commissioner for the barons of the shire of Wigton..

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, mayor, lord, london, worcester, william, ward, set, religion, poll, people, party, parliament, office, mr., men, man, law, james, israel, instrument, house, god, eliab, early, defenders, court, county, council, common, collonel, city, church, charter, business, bridgwater, basil, barons

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 men, and The Bishop of Worcester''s letter to his reverend clergy within the county and diocess of Worcester with some short and genuine animadversions upon it. 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, text, time, people, cause, texts, man, way, characters, works, election, xml, elections, right, work, books, thing, image, day, data, page, images, years, case, number, title, times, project, reason, keying, encoding, elements, eebo, edition, things, nothing, others, part, gentlemen, none, hath, instances, question, persons, words, choice, year, sets, selection, person

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, was, are, have, were, been, being, had, chosen, made, do, said, did, make, say, encoded, according, give, take, come, chuse, taken, based, given, let, published, serve, sent, marked, know, called, done, choose, elected, vote, represented, create, came, -, having, created, appears, think, corrected, returned, meet, go, produce, see

Proper Nouns

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

lord, tcp, mr., god, mayor, city, parliament, sir, common, london, court, election, text, tei, eebo, english, england, council, men, law, charter, oxford, ward, lords, john, william, wards, sheriff, basil, instrument, proquest, phase, partnership, creation, aldermen, house, poll, hall, king, livery, commons, castle, 〉, collonel, ◊, new, defenders, stewart, barons, citizens

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, their, they, he, i, his, them, we, you, our, your, him, my, us, themselves, me, himself, its, thy, theirs, her, one, she, ours, thee, vvith, o, ''s, ''em

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, first, good, great, same, own, early, many, several, english, true, more, available, general, old, whole, present, last, illegible, second, much, greater, right, possible, clear, little, former, common, due, usual, ancient, pleased, least, next, less, large, chief, ill, subject, original, wide, short, later, 17th, textual, syntactic, structural, readable, quality

not, so, then, now, therefore, only, very, up, out, as, more, never, well, in, here, also, most, much, yet, even, too, online, early, there, thus, over, ever, together, first, sometimes, still, no, humbly, further, before, indeed, far, else, all, mainly, down, above, usually, about, variously, respectfully, notably, long, accurately, just

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.