Distant Reader - subject-englishWitAndHumor-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 18 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 521,289 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 28,960 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 100. 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:

one, will, man, says, good, sir, well, now, great, like, made, yet, shall, time, hee, came, make, may, much, come, men, two, love, scogin, let, never, told, gentleman, day, must, house, know, wife, haue, see, take, say, another, old, went, many, doe, doth, first, long, fellow, might, night, king, quoth

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Versatile ingenium, The Wittie companion, or Jests of all sorts. From citie and countrie, court and universitie. : With an account of the life of the laughing philosopher Democritus of Abder̀a. / By Democritus Junior., Recreation for ingenious head-peeces, or, A pleasant grove for their wits to walk in of epigrams 700, epitaphs 200, fancies a number, fantasticks abundance : with their addition, multiplication, and division., and Wits recreations. Selected from the finest fancies of moderne muses.

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

sir thomas, sir lambert, english books, early english, one day, old man, books online, sir vane, young man, sir william, every one, page images, creation partnership, text creation, next day, let us, will make, one another, forty tyrants, every day, honest man, must needs, will never, long time, represented either, came home, image sets, characters represented, tcp schema, one night, sayes hee, hundred pounds, euery man, says one, man may, wise men, may see, must know, scogin went, many times, waxed boots, great deal, old woman, two gentlemen, one told, shall haue, well sayes, good man, one side, will take

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Witty apophthegms delivered at several times, and upon several occasions by King James, King Charls, the Marquess of Worcester, Francis Lord Bacon, and Sir Thomas Moor ; collected and revised. Versatile ingenium, The Wittie companion, or Jests of all sorts. From citie and countrie, court and universitie. : With an account of the life of the laughing philosopher Democritus of Abder̀a. / By Democritus Junior., and Walk knaves, walk. A discourse intended to have been spoken at court and now publish''d for the satisfaction of all those that have participated of the svveetness of publike employments. By Hodg Tvrbervil, chaplain to the late Lord Hevvson..

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, sir, man, gentleman, lady, king, good, woman, wife, time, master, lord, like, church, maid, love, hee, fellow, father, court, thy, thee, son, house, haue, hath, god, english, country, william, vpon, thou, thomas, sun, priest, land, justice, iustice, iohn, iest, husband, head, great, doth, death, countrey, child, castle, book, world

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 said, and Coffee-house jests. Refined and enlarged. By the author of the Oxford jests. The fourth edition, with large additions. This may be re-printed, Feb. 25. 1685. R.P. 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?":

man, t, time, men, day, house, wife, night, death, love, way, nothing, hee, woman, life, heart, horse, fellow, none, thing, place, head, money, friend, reason, world, bed, doth, hand, ▪, one, self, end, eyes, name, things, times, part, mind, hath, l, rest, wit, words, husband, face, others, fire, friends, morning

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:

was, is, be, had, said, have, are, were, did, says, being, do, made, came, make, come, ''s, let, told, know, see, am, take, say, went, tell, give, been, put, go, thought, sent, having, brought, think, done, answered, haue, find, quoth, asked, gave, set, found, took, pray, saw, heard, saying, got

Proper Nouns

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

〉, ◊, sir, thou, 〈, scogin, gentleman, ●, king, lord, god, tarlton, doe, hath, hee, master, haue, knight, lady, london, tcp, hée, dobson, t, marquess, father, house, oxford, wife, man, thomas, church, countrey, fellow, court, le, mr., quoth, heaven, priest, goe, lambert, english, c., ye, love, text, ale, vp, majesty

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, his, i, it, him, you, her, my, they, she, your, me, them, their, we, our, thy, himself, us, thee, ''em, themselves, mine, one, its, vp, yours, l, ''s, hers, ours, ye, theirs, em, ●, us''d, s, nay, vnto, ts, sayd, imself, dy''d, 〈, ♓, yee, wo''d, whosoever, whereof, wag''d

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?"

good, other, great, such, more, many, old, little, much, young, true, own, last, same, first, best, poor, better, long, next, full, wise, new, sweet, dead, rich, sure, most, honest, ill, fair, high, whole, small, strange, short, english, doth, ready, bad, able, second, free, several, least, early, mad, cold, certain, worth

not, so, then, now, very, out, well, as, never, up, here, too, there, more, away, thus, yet, much, therefore, still, in, down, together, long, again, ever, no, before, most, first, off, also, once, only, home, all, indeed, rather, else, onely, often, presently, n''t, forth, on, enough, back, over, just, better

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.