subject-exciseTax-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 26 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 43,023 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 1,654 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 81. 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:

text, parliament, excise, early, english, tcp, shall, england, commons, books, lords, online, committee, great, thomason, eebo, will, works, encoded, commissioners, one, ordinance, time, thereof, phase, made, xml, king, image, wales, work, page, images, transcribed, first, every, day, printed, markup, house, many, john, london, new, now, assembled, proofread, support, may, whole

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are A declaration and protestation against the illegal, detestable, oft-condemned, new tax and extortion of excise in general; and for hops (a native incertain commodity) in particular. By William Prynne of Swainswick, Esq;, A declaration in vindication of the honour of the Parliament, and of the committee of the navy and customes; against all traducers: concerning the managing of the navy and customes, and many other weighty affaires of state: faithfully relating what strength of shipping have been yearly employed for the guarding of the seas, and what moneys arising by the revenue of the customes, excise of flesh and salt, and other receits, have been applyed to that use. The rules by which they have been all managed; and a just account how the moneys have been disposed. By Giles Grene, a member of the Honourable House of Commons., and Die Martis, 11. Iulii, 1648. Whereas the Lords and Commons assembled, have been necessitated to take up and anticipate severall great sums of mony for the service of the Parliament, ....

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

english books, early english, books online, early works, textual changes, text creation, creation partnership, page images, parliament assembled, excise tax, tcp assigned, encoded text, online text, commercial purposes, tiff page, proquest page, asking permission, financial support, creative commons, text transcribed, xml conversion, work described, bit group, encoded edition, without asking, institutions providing, providing financial, markup reviewed, image set, iv tiff, pfs batch, batch review, images scanned, page image, mona logarbo, gap elements, archaic forms, stationer meant, preserves archaic, short title, computationally tractable, metadata enrichments, standardized format, title catalog, fully proofread, great britain, digital transcription, standard spellings, many walks, collaborative curation

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are A proclamation, for rouping the in-land excise of this kingdom A proclamation, for payment of His Majesties cess and excise, and Proclamation appointing twenty shillings to be payed for every boll of foreign victual that shall be imported.

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, commons, excise, sope, scotland, ordinance, navy, nation, massey, majesties, lord, king, john, james, house, god, england, declaration, customes, council, committee, commissioners, act, aberdeen

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 text, and A declaration and protestation against the illegal, detestable, oft-condemned, new tax and extortion of excise in general; and for hops (a native incertain commodity) in particular. By William Prynne of Swainswick, Esq; 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:

1. text - A declaration in vindication of the honour of the Parliament, and of the committee of the navy and customes; against all traducers: concerning the managing of the navy and customes, and many other weighty affaires of state: faithfully relating what strength of shipping have been yearly employed for the guarding of the seas, and what moneys arising by the revenue of the customes, excise of flesh and salt, and other receits, have been applyed to that use. The rules by which they have been all managed; and a just account how the moneys have been disposed. By Giles Grene, a member of the Honourable House of Commons.
2. parliament - A declaration and protestation against the illegal, detestable, oft-condemned, new tax and extortion of excise in general; and for hops (a native incertain commodity) in particular. By William Prynne of Swainswick, Esq;
3. sope - To the supreme authority the Parliament of the Common-wealth of England some considerations about the excise of 4s. 8d. per barrell upon sope, humbly offered by the sope-makers of London, who lately presented their petition to your Honors.

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:

1. text, parliament, excise - A declaration in vindication of the honour of the Parliament, and of the committee of the navy and customes; against all traducers: concerning the managing of the navy and customes, and many other weighty affaires of state: faithfully relating what strength of shipping have been yearly employed for the guarding of the seas, and what moneys arising by the revenue of the customes, excise of flesh and salt, and other receits, have been applyed to that use. The rules by which they have been all managed; and a just account how the moneys have been disposed. By Giles Grene, a member of the Honourable House of Commons.
2. parliament, excise, shall - A declaration and protestation against the illegal, detestable, oft-condemned, new tax and extortion of excise in general; and for hops (a native incertain commodity) in particular. By William Prynne of Swainswick, Esq;
3. excise, sope, materials - To the supreme authority the Parliament of the Common-wealth of England some considerations about the excise of 4s. 8d. per barrell upon sope, humbly offered by the sope-makers of London, who lately presented their petition to your Honors.
4. said, sir, james - Die Martis, 17. Octob. 1643 An ordinance of the Lords and Commons assembled in Parliament; concerning all brewers and makers of beer, ale, cider, or perry for payment of the excise imposed by an ordinance of Parliament, before the delivering thereof, upon pain of forfeiture of double the value of the said commodities.
5. excyse, aberdeen, collectors - By Andrew Fraser (design''d) of Kinmundie, sheriff-deput of Aberdeen Advertisement for collecting His Maiesties revenew of inland excyse, within the sheriffdooms of Kincardine, Aberdeen and Bamff.

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?":

text, excise, works, books, xml, time, image, page, work, images, day, changes, people, transcription, parliament, texts, keying, end, eebo, edition, purposes, tax, power, persons, elements, support, users, pounds, payment, markup, p., characters, others, ordinance, author, title, terms, men, life, kings, review, reuse, reproduction, phase, pfs, permission, microfilm, kb, institutions, group

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, was, said, been, were, are, encoded, made, has, do, make, assembled, according, pay, aim, did, take, had, based, paid, given, being, -, taken, read, set, providing, owned, assigned, reviewed, performed, ordained, give, scanned, modified, edited, distributed, described, copied, coded, co, asking, sent, ordered, published, publish, making, restoring

Proper Nouns

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

parliament, excise, tcp, england, commons, lords, committee, english, thomason, text, wales, london, john, house, commissioners, c., transcribed, king, god, navy, ordinance, proquest, phase, partnership, creation, printed, customes, act, online, lord, die, wing, tei, kingdom, excize, eebo, hath, books, new, sampled, officers, majesties, iv, universal, tiff, qc, oxford, keyed, great, creative

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?"

their, it, i, they, our, his, them, my, he, we, him, me, your, you, themselves, thy, us, himself, severall, thee, her, its

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, early, such, same, english, many, great, whole, textual, first, due, available, late, present, new, own, keyboarded, financial, commercial, proofread, last, tractable, suitable, standardized, standard, seekest, professional, enriched, easier, digital, collaborative, honourable, most, markup, common, known, full, several, more, good, general, true, private, particular, much, illegal, greater, second, respective, former

not, so, then, thereof, early, now, online, more, therefore, up, even, as, very, out, most, fully, above, well, ever, hereby, whatsoever, never, in, linguistically, computationally, yet, only, much, therein, also, here, forth, off, together, over, longer, just, further, first, still, otherwise, again, accordingly, thus, rather, onely, no, next, humbly, on

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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