Distant Reader - subject-excommunication-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 14 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,054,269 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 75,304 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 87. 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:

church, god, christ, power, may, one, will, law, magistrate, things, must, word, men, man, yet, shall, saith, us, say, doth, now, first, government, thing, therefore, de, onely, erastus, sacrament, though, apostles, without, scripture, place, make, lord, christian, churches, good, excommunication, non, much, civill, reason, made, gods, also, might, persons, worship

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The divine right of church-government and excommunication: or a peacable dispute for the perfection of the holy scripture in point of ceremonies and church government; in which the removal of the Service-book is justifi''d, the six books of Tho: Erastus against excommunication are briefly examin''d; with a vindication of that eminent divine Theod: Beza against the aspersions of Erastus, the arguments of Mr. William Pryn, Rich: Hooker, Dr. Morton, Dr. Jackson, Dr. John Forbes, and the doctors of Aberdeen; touching will-worship, ceremonies, imagery, idolatry, things indifferent, an ambulatory government; the due and just powers of the magistrate in matters of religion, and the arguments of Mr. Pryn, in so far as they side with Erastus, are modestly discussed. To which is added, a brief tractate of scandal ... / By Samuel Rutherfurd, Professor of Divinity in the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Published by authority., Irenicum A weapon-salve for the churches wounds, or The divine right of particular forms of church-government : discuss''d and examin''d according to the principles of the law of nature .../ by Edward Stillingfleete ..., and Aarons rod blossoming, or, The divine ordinance of church-government vindicated so as the present Erastian controversie concerning the distinction of civill and ecclesiasticall government, excommunication, and suspension, is fully debated and discussed, from the holy scripture, from the Jewish and Christian antiquities, from the consent of latter writers, from the true nature and rights of magistracy, and from the groundlesnesse of the chief objections made against the Presbyteriall government in point of a domineering arbitrary unlimited power / by George Gillespie ....

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

lords supper, new testament, holy things, tells us, blessed saviour, christian magistrate, jesus christ, holy ghost, iesus christ, lords table, whole church, divine right, christian church, visible church, every one, gods word, scandalous persons, old testament, erastus saith, converting ordinance, civill magistrate, divine institution, every man, heathen man, let us, church government, must needs, ad ann, jewish church, things indifferent, positive laws, positive law, primitive church, scandalous sinners, master prynne, magistrate may, high priest, gods worship, tell us, wicked men, take away, civil magistrate, gods law, early english, english books, simon magus, civil power, one another, two things, will say

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are A vindication of foure serious questions of grand importance, concerning excommunication and suspention from the sacrament of the Lords Supper, from some misprisions and unjust exceptions lately taken against them; both in the pulpit, by a reverend brother of Scotland, in a sermon at Margarets Church in Westminster, before the Honourable House of Commons, at a publike fast there held for Scotland, on the 5th of September last: and in the presse, by three new-printed pamphlets, by way of answer to, and censure of them. Wherein some scripture texts, (commonly reproduced for excommunication, and bare suspention from the Lords Supper onely,) are cleared from false glosses, inferences, conclusions wrested from them; ... / By William Prynne of Lincolns Inne, Esquire. A late dialogue betwixt a civilian and a divine concerning the present condition of the Church of England in which, among other particulars, these following are especially spoken of ..., and A brotherly and friendly censure of the errour of a dear friend and brother in Christian affection, in an answer to his four questions lately sent abroad in print to the view of the world. Published according to order..

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:

church, god, law, christ, word, scripture, magistrate, lords, christian, tcp, sacrament, gospel, cor, authority, text, testament, temple, table, synagogue, supper, state, power, paul, passeover, ministers, matth, jewish, government, excommunication, elders, doctrine, churches, apostles, act, spirit, society, saviour, saints, sacraments, roman, religion, publican, prophets, prince, priests, pastors, officers, minister, lord, levites

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 church, and A discourse concerning the power of excommunication in a Christian church, by way of appendix to the Irenicum by Edward Stillingfleet ... 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?":

power, things, men, man, thing, p., ▪, word, place, church, reason, others, persons, scripture, time, way, magistrate, doth, words, ad, people, hath, nature, cap, argument, part, nothing, person, excommunication, worship, brother, name, order, civill, apostles, end, authority, case, law, conscience, one, none, government, body, faith, sin, life, use, matter, death

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, was, are, were, have, had, did, do, say, being, make, made, been, said, given, prove, come, give, according, see, take, let, put, done, called, know, hath, concerning, eat, commanded, judge, taken, cast, admitted, deny, set, proved, think, read, answer, having, meant, hold, doth, saith, receive, teach, used, tells

Proper Nouns

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

〉, ◊, 〈, church, god, christ, law, c., erastus, ●, magistrate, sacrament, lord, de, paul, government, cor, word, hath, peter, lords, christian, apostles, gods, king, pag, churches, ye, pope, gospel, supper, heathen, ergo, matth, magistrates, lib, christs, temple, est, christians, bishop, moses, l., divine, excommunication, rome, text, ans, power, saviour

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, he, they, his, i, their, them, we, him, our, us, you, my, themselves, your, himself, me, its, her, thy, thee, she, ye, one, theirs, ours, yours, s, mine, u, itself, à, whereof, o, ●, quo, f, yee, whosoever, non, ib, y, wr, wil, whence, ut, us''d, ulteriori, turkes, themself

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, same, many, good, scandalous, more, great, first, true, own, necessary, particular, holy, saith, whole, common, civil, much, private, indifferent, false, lawfull, second, evident, positive, visible, new, present, christian, greater, very, religious, former, distinct, jewish, several, divine, wicked, like, non, different, least, publike, unworthy, little, unclean, doth, old, free

not, so, then, now, therefore, only, onely, as, more, also, here, yet, well, most, out, thus, first, never, even, very, much, far, up, there, that, off, is, together, ever, before, all, rather, down, away, no, else, in, at, too, hence, otherwise, certainly, especially, further, forth, secondly, still, immediately, indeed, again

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.