Distant Reader - subject-infantBaptism-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 56 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 3,727,731 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 66,566 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:

baptism, covenant, god, infants, church, christ, mr, yet, may, children, will, one, baptized, say, faith, therefore, must, us, made, now, seed, though, shall, first, men, promise, much, also, saith, circumcision, true, holy, infant, doth, grace, onely, without, visible, well, abraham, many, gospel, words, word, make, believers, man, answer, thing, things

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Anti-pædobaptism, or, The third part being a full review of the dispute concerning infant baptism : in which the arguments for infant baptism from the covenant and initial seal, infants visible church membership, antiquity of infant baptism are refelled [sic] : and the writings of Mr. Stephen Marshal, Mr. Richard Baxter ... and others are examined, and many points about the covenants, and seals and other truths of weight are handled / by John Tombes., Christianismus redivivus Christndom both un-christ''ned and new-christ''ned, or, that good old way of dipping and in-churching of men and women after faith and repentance professed, commonly (but not properly) called Anabaptism, vindicated ... : in five or six several systems containing a general answer ... : not onely a publick disputation for infant baptism managed by many ministers before thousands of people against this author ... : but also Mr. Baxters Scripture proofs are proved Scriptureless ... / by Samuel Fisher ..., and Baby-baptism meer babism, or, An answer to nobody in five words to every-body who finds himself concern''d in''t by Samuel Fisher..

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

visible church, roman non, infant baptism, new testament, holy ghost, holy spirit, lords supper, jesus christ, natural seed, little children, must needs, spiritual seed, every one, covenant made, believing parents, god made, little ones, tells us, abrahams seed, old testament, saith mr, jewish church, tell us, believers infants, let us, dying infants, made disciples, invisible church, fleshly seed, gospel covenant, new covenant, christian church, much less, god will, believing gentiles, gods covenant, baptize infants, visible churchmembership, english books, infants baptism, early english, lord jesus, whole body, holy seed, true believers, visible churchmembers, old covenant, may see, books online, thing signified

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Anti-pædobaptism, or, The third part being a full review of the dispute concerning infant baptism : in which the arguments for infant baptism from the covenant and initial seal, infants visible church membership, antiquity of infant baptism are refelled [sic] : and the writings of Mr. Stephen Marshal, Mr. Richard Baxter ... and others are examined, and many points about the covenants, and seals and other truths of weight are handled / by John Tombes. A discourse of baptisme, its institution and efficacy upon all believers. Together with a consideration of the practise of the Church in baptizing infants of beleeving parents: and the practise justified by Jer: Taylor D.D., and Tvvo treatises and an appendix to them concerning infant-baptisme. The former treatise being an exercitation presented to the chair-man of a committee of the Assembly of Divines. The later an examen of the sermon of Mr Stephen Marshall, about infant-baptisme, in a letter sent to him. / By John Tombes. B.D..

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, covenant, infants, christ, baptism, gospel, law, scripture, children, lord, mr., circumcision, grace, testament, christian, abraham, spirit, baptisme, sacrament, roman, parents, faith, cor, seed, argument, anabaptists, gods, gentiles, apostle, text, new, matth, mat, lords, jews, jewes, ghost, father, apostles, acts, sect, rom, kingdome, churches, blake, water, reader, ordinance, nations

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 baptism, and The Pædo-baptists apology for the baptized churches shewing the invalidity of the strongest grounds for infant baptism out of the works of the learned assertors of that tenent, and that the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins is a duty incumbent upon all sinners who come orderly to the profession of Christianity : also the promise of the Spirit [b]eing the substance of a sermon on I Cor. 12, I, to which is added a post-script out of the works of Dr. Jer. Taylor in defence of imposition of hands as a never failing ministery / by Tho. Grantham. 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?":

infants, baptism, children, faith, seed, men, words, thing, things, promise, way, believers, part, man, word, reason, time, viz, church, truth, covenant, people, argument, grace, scripture, parents, others, persons, t, sense, circumcision, p., water, none, self, infant, place, nothing, members, world, doth, right, hath, day, salvation, one, disciples, name, answer, years

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, was, have, were, do, baptized, had, say, being, did, made, said, been, make, prove, know, come, see, according, believe, called, done, take, give, baptize, let, put, answer, deny, think, meant, given, taken, concerning, born, circumcised, proved, am, believing, find, brought, ''s, hath, shew, baptizing, go, speak, received

Proper Nouns

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

〉, ◊, 〈, god, christ, covenant, mr., church, baptism, c., abraham, gospel, hath, ●, lord, law, infants, circumcision, infant, jews, christs, spirit, holy, gods, i., e., grace, dr., yea, rom, faith, gen., children, john, b., apostles, disciples, christians, baptisme, testament, pag, cor, christian, apostle, thou, gentiles, text, new, abrahams, jesus

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, i, they, he, his, you, them, their, we, your, him, my, our, us, me, himself, themselves, its, her, thy, she, thee, theirs, ours, yours, one, mine, ye, ''s, ''em, itself, l, ●, em, ts, s, us''d, urg''d, myself, hee, o, heb, whereof, ay, whosoever, trodden, shou''d, ee, vvhat, sanctificās

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, true, visible, many, own, more, first, little, good, holy, much, great, whole, old, non, -, new, saith, false, capable, roman, least, spiritual, very, natural, outward, particular, plain, jewish, present, necessary, second, common, better, former, last, right, certain, doth, evident, sure, most, christian, few, like, sufficient, external, proper

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

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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