Distant Reader - subject-goodAndEvil-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 10 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 704,309 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 70,430 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 95. 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:

god, will, may, man, men, us, good, things, yet, doth, one, great, shall, make, satan, sin, must, like, first, though, life, heart, condition, many, christ, way, nature, much, now, time, see, also, made, thoughts, thing, take, hee, love, power, might, know, every, without, say, mind, give, world, others, reason, gods

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Demonologia sacra, or, A treatise of Satan''s temptations in three parts / by Richard Gilpin., A posing question, put by the wise man, viz. Solomon, to the wisest men concerning making a judgment of the temporal conditions : wherein you have the ignorance of man (in knowing, what is good, or evil, for man in this life) discovered, together, with the mistakes that flow from it : and the great question resolved, viz. whether the knowledg of, what is good for a man in this life, be so hid from man, that no man can attain it / preached at the weekly lecture at Upton ... by Benjamin Baxter ..., and An history of angells being a theologicall treatise of our communion and warre with them : handled on the 6th chapter of the Ephesians, the 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 verses / by Henry Lawrence ....

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

let us, afflicted condition, must needs, every one, wicked men, sensitive spirits, will make, may say, every thing, prosperous condition, tells us, god will, may see, man may, good things, many times, one another, mean time, must know, shall find, jesus christ, many things, wee must, rationall spirits, may know, will never, godly man, god doth, english books, early english, holy ghost, make us, may observe, satan doth, old man, take heed, every man, two things, gods children, may make, take away, will say, great deal, books online, great many, outward things, will give, one thing, make good, take notice

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Philosophicall fancies. Written by the Right Honourable, the Lady Newcastle. Natures picture drawn by fancies pencil to the life being several feigned stories, comical, tragical, tragi-comical, poetical, romanicical, philosophical, historical, and moral : some in verse, some in prose, some mixt, and some by dialogues / written by ... the Duchess of Newcastle., and Mentis humanæ metamorphosis, sive conversio, The history of the young converted gallant, or, Directions to the readers of that divine poem written by Benjamin Keach, intituled Warre with the devil here shewing the readers thereof how to read the same poem aright in these four respects, viz. I. in reference to the substance or history thereof, II. in reference to the intent or mystery thereof, III. in reference to the consequent doctrine thereof, IV. in reference to practical application thereof / compiled in a poem by J. Mason, Gent. ....

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:

god, man, nature, lord, christ, scripture, psal, heart, world, tcp, soul, sin, life, law, church, body, truth, thoughts, spirits, spirit, saints, reason, pride, mind, men, matter, honour, grace, good, gods, father, eyes, evil, conscience, children, apostle, youth, worship, wit, wilderness, wife, whore, wee, virtue, understanding, time, thought, thing, temptations, temptation

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 god, and A refutation of the objections against moral good and evil in a sermon preach''d at the Cathedral-Church of St. Paul, October the third, 1698 : being the seventh of the lecture for that year, founded by the Honourable Robert Boyle, Esq. / by John Harris. 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?":

things, man, men, sin, way, heart, thing, condition, life, time, doth, others, t, mind, reason, nature, thoughts, self, nothing, hath, power, part, body, scripture, truth, place, death, hearts, ways, hee, temptations, love, word, day, work, light, end, words, advantage, hand, sins, none, matter, spirits, use, times, kind, design, soul, p.

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, have, was, were, do, said, had, did, make, being, see, made, take, know, give, say, been, come, let, makes, put, hath, set, think, doth, go, find, ''s, done, came, consider, called, thought, am, keep, live, according, cast, having, speak, concerning, bring, given, gives, look, tell, found, brought

Proper Nouns

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

god, satan, 〉, ◊, 〈, christ, men, hath, lord, man, thou, wee, gods, spirit, devil, c., world, nature, spirits, love, soul, life, heaven, hee, power, children, lady, thoughts, matter, temptation, father, david, angells, earth, mans, conscience, truth, king, chap, ibid, psal, prince, pride, law, divell, condition, church, job, honour, motion

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, their, them, i, we, him, you, our, her, she, us, my, your, me, themselves, himself, its, thy, thee, one, theirs, mine, yours, ours, ye, vp, hers, ''s, whereof, itself, hee, elias, dy''d, †, whosoever, vvith, t''uch, severall, s, ●, ‡, yourself, vvhat, vai''ld, ts, trodden, thou

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, good, great, other, many, more, own, same, much, first, true, several, little, old, wicked, last, high, particular, most, best, greater, doth, full, evil, like, outward, young, right, false, common, greatest, natural, better, strong, least, present, new, second, whole, apt, vain, strange, necessary, able, general, rich, ready, former, wise, poor

not, so, then, more, up, thus, only, out, now, also, as, first, yet, therefore, most, never, very, well, here, much, secondly, sometimes, away, down, ever, there, too, in, still, rather, often, off, that, far, thirdly, indeed, is, again, no, together, all, easily, onely, forth, even, hence, long, before, usually, thereof

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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