Distant Reader - subject-fishing-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 12 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 448,182 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 37,348 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 97. 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:

will, may, take, make, must, water, put, shall, fish, let, one, little, two, much, good, well, time, first, till, now, yet, like, three, together, great, best, small, ground, also, every, long, sugar, come, made, day, give, place, th, half, ar, without, horse, either, boyl, white, four, therefore, hawk, way, fly

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The gentleman''s recreation in four parts, viz. hunting, hawking, fowling, fishing : wherein these generous exercises are largely treated of, and the terms of art for hunting and hawking more amply enlarged than heretofore : whereto is prefixt a large sculpture, giving easie directions for blowing the horn, and other sculptures inserted proper to each recreation : with an abstract at the end of each subject of such laws as relate to the same., The second booke of the English husbandman Contayning the ordering of the kitchin-garden, and the planting of strange flowers: the breeding of all manner of cattell. Together with the cures, the feeding of cattell, the ordering both of pastures and meddow-ground: with the vse both of high-wood and vnder-wood. Whereunto is added a treatise, called Good mens recreation: contayning a discourse of the generall art of fishing, with the angle, and otherwise; and of all the hidden secrets belonging thereunto. Together vvith the choyce, ordering, breeding, and dyeting of the fighting cocke. A worke neuer written before by any author. By G.M., and Northern memoirs, calculated for the meridian of Scotland wherein most or all of the cities, citadels, seaports, castles, forts, fortresses, rivers and rivulets are compendiously described : together with choice collections of various discoveries, remarkable observations, theological notions ... : to which is added the contemplative & practical angler ... / writ in the year 1658, but not till now made publick, by Richard Franck ....

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

will make, let us, will find, early english, english books, sweet butter, well together, may take, books online, take away, take two, must take, good store, two ounces, fair water, will take, may see, latter end, may make, le ts, sweet herbs, put thereto, text creation, four ounces, one another, creation partnership, page images, will never, shall find, four times, shall take, every one, will bite, three days, four days, several sorts, take notice, young ones, short time, every day, take three, fine sugar, best way, three pints, take half, will come, large mace, may know, grated bread, good quantity

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The compleat angler or, The contemplative man''s recreation. Being a discourse of fish and fishing, not unworthy the perusal of most anglers. The Accomplish''d lady''s delight in preserving, physick, beautifying, and cookery containing I. the art of preserving and candying fruits & flowers ..., II. the physical cabinet, or, excellent receipts in physick and chirurgery : together with some rare beautifying waters, to adorn and add loveliness to the face and body : and also some new and excellent secrets and experiments in the art of angling, 3. the compleat cooks guide, or, directions for dressing all sorts of flesh, fowl, and fish, both in the English and French mode ..., and To the King and both Houses of Parliament in Parliament assembled.

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, fish, water, river, trout, sun, pike, line, hook, art, angler, streams, sir, rod, nature, horse, flie, earth, body, world, woods, winter, wings, wine, wind, vinegar, trée, trent, train, trade, town, time, timber, tail, syrup, sunne, sugar, spring, sport, song, shotland, shores, sea, scholer, salmon, rose, rocks, rivulets, rivers, pye

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 make, and The names of the members of the Fishing Society, anno 1670 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?":

water, fish, time, day, ground, way, place, self, part, manner, end, horse, art, hook, man, pound, body, others, thing, sorts, line, days, night, year, reason, times, quantity, nature, nothing, side, men, head, earth, morning, top, angling, fire, t, page, places, pleasure, hath, dish, worms, things, weather, hand, rest, season, pint

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, are, take, have, make, put, let, do, being, was, come, made, ''s, give, having, were, keep, see, find, set, know, called, had, lay, cut, been, say, boyl, taken, stand, go, has, think, use, according, feed, serve, run, found, observe, cast, beat, grow, fish, done, fly, call, draw, kill

Proper Nouns

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

sugar, ar, hawk, water, river, angler, sun, streams, trout, c., hounds, head, pike, rose, sir, fowl, hart, rod, earth, tcp, hare, england, bait, paste, scotland, rivers, hook, english, butter, salmon, hath, horse, may, line, man, fly, nature, world, dish, 〉, carp, master, hawks, cream, worm, salt, cinamon, sea, march, winter

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, you, them, your, i, his, they, he, her, him, their, my, we, she, our, me, us, himself, themselves, its, thy, thee, l, one, yours, vp, ts, ''s, mine, ''em, ours, ye, theirs, hay, au, yourself, whereof, us''d, unlodg''d, unfurnish''d, thar, swine, severall, itself, ice, horsemen, himfelf, herself, em, clog''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?"

other, little, good, such, great, small, much, more, best, first, many, same, large, white, strong, own, better, sweet, long, old, cold, most, several, young, high, hot, whole, fine, excellent, fair, clean, true, next, full, black, fresh, dry, sure, short, pleasant, red, hard, like, last, few, warm, least, thick, natural, green

then, not, so, very, as, up, well, now, together, out, more, also, in, most, first, therefore, much, too, thus, off, here, never, again, only, there, onely, down, long, away, sometimes, yet, especially, almost, still, over, about, enough, all, forth, thereof, often, else, far, ever, always, rather, before, usually, on, once

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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