Distant Reader - subject-englandAndWales-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 646 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 6,059,654 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 9,380 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 85. 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:

king, parliament, xml, house, id, may, shall, will, one, great, pos, lemma, made, time, lords, de, lord, text, first, kings, bill, men, mr, sir, now, commons, people, without, england, day, god, law, yet, good, us, many, much, power, make, two, english, et, also, might, therefore, others, man, well, present, read

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The soveraigne povver of parliaments and kingdomes divided into foure parts· Together with an appendix: wherein the superiority of our owne, and most other foraine parliaments, states, kingdomes, magistrates, (collectively considered,) over and above their lawfull emperours, kings, princes, is abundantly evidenced, confirmed by pregnant reasons, resolutions, precedents, histories, authorities of all sorts; the contrary objections re-felled: the treachery and disloyalty of papists to their soveraignes, with their present plots to extirpate the Protestant religion demonstrated; and all materiall objections, calumnies, of the King, his counsell, royallists, malignants, delinquents, papists, against the present Parliaments proceedings, (pretended to be exceeding derogatory to the Kings supremacy, and subjects liberty) satisfactorily answered, refuted, dissipated in all particulars. By William Prynne, utter-barrester, of Lincolnes Inne. It is on this second day of August, 1643. ordered ... that this booke ... be printed by Michael Sparke ..., A plea for the Lords, and House of Peers, or, A full, necessary, seasonable enlarged vindication of the just, antient hereditary right of the earls, lords, peers, and barons of this realm to sit, vote, judge, in all the parliaments of England wherein their right of session, and sole power of judicature without the Commons as peers ... / by William Prynne., and The journals of all the Parliaments during the reign of Queen Elizabeth both of the House of Lords and House of Commons / collected by Sir Simonds D''Ewes ... Knight and Baronet ; revised and published by Paul Bowes ..., Esq..

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

english books, early english, th day, pc xml, books online, pos acp, page images, creation partnership, text creation, early works, sir thomas, one reading, textual changes, sir william, unit sentence, upper house, great moment, sir john, second time, encoded edition, work described, image set, online text, providing financial, creative commons, financial support, institutions providing, bit group, xml conversion, commercial purposes, markup reviewed, images scanned, text transcribed, batch review, encoded text, tcp assigned, pfs batch, asking permission, without asking, iv tiff, proquest page, tiff page, great britain, common law, present parliament, original journal, lord keeper, sir edward, pos vvi, vvi xml

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are To the honourable, the Commons of England in Parliament assembled[.] The humble petition of Abel Carew, an excluded door-keeper from this honourable House At the court at Whitehall the 25. of June, 1667. Present the Kings most Excellent Majesty, ... Whereas it is generally reported, that many seamen and soldiers who have served his Majesty at sea, are frequently constrained to give money, or lose some part of their wages to recover the rest: ..., and Die Veneris 28⁰ Martij, 1690. Upon reading this day in the House the several lists delivered in by the sheriffs of London and Middlesex, the bayliff of the borough of Southwark, the marshal of the Marshalsea, and the steward of Westminster, and their officers to whom it did belong, pursuant to an order of the twenty fourth instant, of the protections entred in their offices, in the names of any Peers, or Members of this House, and to whom they were granted ....

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, tcp, king, house, army, commons, lord, law, lords, england, majesty, god, court, members, people, nation, church, sir, act, government, kingdom, english, majesties, laws, officers, kingdome, early, religion, city, prince, council, john, power, london, houses, statute, william, mr., general, duke, authority, county, committee, oath, crown, bishops, thomason, ireland, declaration, subjects

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 A true and ful relation of the officers and Armies forcible seising of divers eminent Members of the Commons House, Decemb. 6. & 7. 1648. As also, a true copy of a letter / lately written by an agent for the Army in Paris, dated 28 of Novemb. 1648, to a Member of the said House, a great creature and patriot of the Army; clearly discovering, that their late remonstrance and proceedings do drive on and promote the Jesuits and Papists designes, to the subversion of religion, Parliament, monarchy, and the fundamental laws and government of the kingdom. 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?":

xml, time, day, people, men, p., text, kings, others, power, man, part, king, things, thing, way, reason, persons, members, words, end, place, person, hath, ad, times, subjects, self, order, pc, nothing, cause, case, books, manner, matter, works, life, l, death, peace, work, images, t, ▪, name, hands, divers, page, hand

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, have, were, are, had, said, being, made, been, did, do, make, read, take, done, say, sent, according, give, put, see, having, given, taken, come, concerning, set, brought, let, has, called, appointed, touching, know, encoded, came, thought, committed, think, passed, found, hath, meet, ordered, am, delivered, bring, used

Proper Nouns

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

parliament, king, house, id="a37285, c., lord, lords, d., sir, bill, mr., w, commons, england, god, de, law, m, majesty, e., tcp, army, ●, court, london, et, john, h., english, hath, l., r, 〉, act, william, thomas, kingdom, church, ◊, 〈, prince, laws, majesties, henry, kingdome, text, kings, edward, houses, government

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, his, their, they, he, them, i, our, him, we, you, your, my, us, her, themselves, me, himself, she, its, thy, thee, theirs, one, ours, ''em, yours, mine, ye, ''s, em, whereof, vvith, severall, s, itself, us''d, ourselves, u, herself, l, ian, wigorn, vp, non, vvhat, hers, yee, ●, yourself

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, great, same, many, good, first, own, more, present, whole, last, much, true, second, new, common, early, most, former, late, id="a37285, english, several, third, free, particular, least, little, greater, certain, very, better, old, next, full, like, necessary, general, high, due, private, large, best, greatest, contrary, able, available, pos="n1, textual

not, so, then, now, most, more, also, as, up, therefore, only, very, well, never, out, there, yet, much, ever, thus, onely, first, here, even, in, thereof, too, together, just, again, away, rather, before, down, all, likewise, long, still, therein, further, far, especially, otherwise, online, no, over, off, indeed, whatsoever, fully

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.