Distant Reader - subject-history-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 11 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 2,582,094 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 234,735 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 91. 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:

great, king, made, time, one, men, many, lib, army, year, first, sent, city, came, things, also, war, yet, now, world, two, son, much, man, might, thousand, cap, years, god, therefore, place, sea, day, people, romans, alexander, country, death, others, make, taken, put, may, brought, every, away, took, part, will, called

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The annals of the world deduced from the origin of time, and continued to the beginning of the Emperour Vespasians reign, and the totall destruction and abolition of the temple and common-wealth of the Jews : containing the historie of the Old and New Testament, with that of the Macchabees, also the most memorable affairs of Asia and Egypt, and the rise of the empire of the Roman Caesars under C. Julius, and Octavianus : collected from all history, as well sacred, as prophane, and methodically digested / by ... James Ussher ..., The historical library of Diodorus the Sicilian in fifteen books : the first five contain the antiquities of Egypt, Asia, Africa, Greece, the islands, and Europe : the last ten an historical account of the affairs of the Persians, Grecians, Macedonians and other parts of the world : to which are added the fragments of Diodorus that are found in the Bibliotheca of Photius : together with those publish''d by H. Valesius, L. Rhodomannus, and F. Ursinus / made English by G. Booth ..., Esq., and The history of Polybius the Megalopolitan The fiue first bookes entire: with all the parcels of the subsequent bookes vnto the eighteenth, according to the Greeke originall. Also the manner of the Romane encamping, extracted from the discription of Polybius. Translated into English by Edward Grimeston, sergeant at armes..

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

julian period, mean time, every one, thousand men, thousand foot, whole army, thousand horse, two hundred, three hundred, tells us, two thousand, next day, three thousand, greatest part, ten thousand, long time, five hundred, every man, hundred thousand, one another, great number, many things, neere vnto, short time, hundred horse, years old, young men, great army, make war, every thing, young man, twenty thousand, high priest, israel reign, great part, set forth, things necessary, juda reign, sent away, many times, two years, thousand talents, got together, one hundred, like manner, wee haue, sent ambassadors, made war, divine revelation, four thousand

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The method and order of reading both civil and ecclesiastical histories in which the most excellent historians are reduced into the order in which they are successively to be read, and the judgments of learned men concerning each of them, subjoin''d / by Degoræus Wheare ... ; to which is added, an appendix concerning the historians of particular nations, as well ancient as modern, by Nicholas Horseman ; made English and enlarged by Edmund Bohun, Esq. ... The annals of the world deduced from the origin of time, and continued to the beginning of the Emperour Vespasians reign, and the totall destruction and abolition of the temple and common-wealth of the Jews : containing the historie of the Old and New Testament, with that of the Macchabees, also the most memorable affairs of Asia and Egypt, and the rise of the empire of the Roman Caesars under C. Julius, and Octavianus : collected from all history, as well sacred, as prophane, and methodically digested / by ... James Ussher ..., and Origines sacræ, or, A rational account of the grounds of Christian faith, as to the truth and divine authority of the Scriptures and the matters therein contained by Edward Stillingfleet ....

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:

king, city, world, romans, nations, lacedemonians, history, empire, country, son, sea, god, father, athenians, alexander, war, souldiers, senate, persians, lord, kingdom, horse, greece, grecians, enemies, cities, carthaginians, army, years, temple, river, men, man, life, law, great, government, gods, general, foot, fleet, enemy, death, countrey, church, christ, chap, ambassadors, victory, town

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 great, and The schollers medley, or, an intermixt discourse vpon historicall and poeticall relations A subiect of it selfe well meriting the approbation of the iudicious, who best know how to confirme their knowledge, by this briefe suruey, or generall table of mixed discourses. ... By Richard Brathvvayte Oxon. 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?":

time, men, things, year, cap, years, man, day, others, people, war, death, place, part, rest, reason, son, way, end, thing, army, kings, country, history, r., ships, world, manner, name, hee, power, number, enemies, p., souldiers, order, king, nothing, side, body, thence, times, ch, horse, life, parts, account, peace, hand, city

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:

was, were, had, be, is, being, made, are, have, did, sent, came, having, make, taken, put, brought, been, took, called, come, set, went, said, done, do, left, gave, say, take, commanded, fell, found, concerning, according, see, given, began, fled, give, lay, thought, slain, seeing, lost, built, coming, go, returned, making

Proper Nouns

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

〉, ◊, 〈, king, lib, city, army, god, alexander, romans, p., sea, world, rome, pag, year, c., egypt, athenians, j., carthaginians, war, asia, men, son, christ, m., ant, ●, caesar, philip, antigonus, ibid, cities, l., temple, greece, antiochus, senate, kingdom, a., lacedemonians, chap, general, syria, horse, enemy, athens, country, father

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?"

his, he, they, their, it, them, him, himself, we, her, i, themselves, our, she, us, you, its, my, me, your, thy, ''em, theirs, thee, one, ib, vp, us''d, ours, vnto, em, herself, ye, †, march''d, itself, dy''d, whereof, mine, hee, yours, s, hers, y, besieg''d, ay, ●, à, wr, whence

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?"

great, other, many, own, such, first, same, whole, more, good, much, little, common, last, several, certain, old, greatest, most, true, former, long, new, second, ancient, greater, able, present, young, next, few, ready, very, necessary, full, least, strong, mean, third, dead, high, saith, famous, best, like, roman, free, small, better, excellent

not, so, then, also, up, now, there, very, therefore, out, more, most, as, away, together, thus, first, only, much, well, yet, far, off, likewise, onely, down, again, afterwards, in, presently, over, before, ever, never, long, here, all, forth, rather, back, even, too, soon, about, especially, on, almost, easily, formerly, still

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.