Distant Reader - subject-freedomOfThePress-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 13 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 176,248 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 13,557 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 89. 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:

may, men, will, god, shall, one, mr, books, religion, man, book, press, yet, must, truth, first, us, now, say, much, great, many, church, lord, printed, good, time, king, make, well, without, either, text, reason, hide, made, thing, law, true, every, people, government, see, know, never, let, self, two, things, take

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are A fresh discovery of the high-Presbyterian spirit. Or The quenching of the second beacon fired. Declaring I. The un-Christian dealings of the authors of a pamphlet, entituled, A second beacon fired, &c. In presenting unto the Lord Protector and Parlament, a falsified passage out of one of Mr John Goodwins books, as containing, either blasphemie, or error, or both. II. The evil of their petition for subjecting the libertie of the press to the arbitrariness and will of a few men. III. The Christian equity, that satisfaction be given to the person so notoriously and publickly wronged. Together with the responsatory epistle of the said beacon firers, to the said Mr Goodwin, fraught with further revilings, falsifications, scurrilous language, &c. insteed of a Christian acknowledgment of their errour. Upon which epistle some animadversions are made, / by John Goodwin, a servant of God in the Gospel of his dear Son. Also two letters written some years since, the one by the said John Goodwin to Mr. J. Caryl; the other, by Mr Caryl in answer hereunto; both relating to the passage above hinted., A modest plea for the due regulation of the press in answer to several reasons lately printed against it, humbly submitted to the judgment of authority / by Francis Gregory, D.D. and rector of Hambleden in the county of Bucks., and A seasonable memorial in some historical notes upon the liberties of the presse and pulpit with the effects of popular petitions, tumults, associations, impostures, and disaffected common councils : to all good subjects and true Protestants..

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

roman non, english books, early english, books online, page images, true religion, text creation, creation partnership, holy ghost, jesus christ, lord mayor, john twyn, tells us, goodwins animadversion, protestant religion, learned men, image sets, characters represented, nathan brooks, represented either, must needs, christian church, tcp schema, late act, national church, every man, late king, tell us, will never, may see, simon dover, christian religion, may justly, amongst us, second beacon, lord chief, one another, civil magistrate, markup reviewed, institutions providing, online text, work described, images scanned, encoded edition, providing financial, text transcribed, creative commons, sacred majesty, proquest page, commercial purposes

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are A short, but just account of the tryal of Benjamin Harris upon an information brought against him for printing and vending a late seditious book called An appeal from the country to the city, for the preservation of His Majesties person, liberty, property, and the Protestant religion. A letter to a member of Parliament, shewing, that a restraint on the press is inconsistent with the Protestant religion, and dangerous to the liberties of the nation, and A seasonable memorial in some historical notes upon the liberties of the presse and pulpit with the effects of popular petitions, tumults, associations, impostures, and disaffected common councils : to all good subjects and true Protestants..

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:

press, tcp, lord, god, books, book, truth, religion, king, church, roman, people, parliament, men, majesty, liberty, john, government, city, world, stationers, state, scriptures, reason, publick, printers, power, petitioner, petition, person, parlament, opinions, nation, mr., mayor, man, magistrate, licenser, letter, learning, keeling, jury, indictment, holy, hide, gospel, goodwins, good, faction, england

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 men, and The humble petitions of Mr. Burton and Dr. Bastwicke presented to the honovrable the knights, citizens, and burgesses of the Commons House of Parliament. 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?":

men, man, books, time, religion, truth, thing, reason, things, people, self, part, way, book, others, nothing, text, t, author, ▪, work, words, person, order, world, word, printing, power, house, hand, hath, cause, selves, matter, p., one, end, title, letter, case, texts, answer, scripture, manner, day, jury, light, sheets, persons, life

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, are, have, was, were, do, did, had, said, been, say, being, make, made, see, know, printed, let, take, has, think, ''s, speak, set, read, am, give, done, put, tell, brought, come, found, according, hide, find, given, heard, called, thought, concerning, having, print, prove, mean, came, answer, taken, published

Proper Nouns

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

god, mr., 〉, press, ◊, 〈, lord, church, l., book, king, c., men, law, government, religion, tcp, parliament, books, christ, hide, authority, england, hath, faith, london, liberty, christian, city, john, english, printed, council, ch, twyn, majesty, persons, ju, commons, sir, p., st., master, walker, truth, state, man, act, power, ye

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, i, they, his, he, their, your, them, we, my, him, our, me, us, themselves, himself, her, its, she, thy, theirs, yours, mine, ''em, thee, ye, one, ours, em, l, itself, herself, yourself, wonder''d, whosoever, us''d, qui, ourselves, ill, ib, him''elf, delf, ''s

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, same, own, many, great, more, good, true, first, much, guilty, -, several, whole, little, non, roman, late, common, least, false, very, able, particular, early, certain, best, last, better, second, next, most, former, english, dangerous, old, greater, new, free, necessary, high, greatest, present, christian, small, few, open, fit, only

not, so, then, as, now, only, more, up, well, very, most, yet, never, therefore, ever, much, here, first, out, thus, again, too, also, there, rather, in, far, already, down, indeed, onely, even, together, over, no, just, still, all, otherwise, else, once, forth, consequently, before, justly, certainly, perhaps, long, further, especially

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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