Distant Reader - subject-knowledge-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 15 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 991,319 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 66,087 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:

ideas, one, will, may, knowledge, man, us, things, yet, thing, men, idea, must, mind, god, make, nature, know, reason, self, made, much, first, love, body, without, another, great, words, therefore, think, nothing, shall, though, say, two, many, like, good, truth, motion, way, every, world, use, part, true, matter, well, time

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are An essay concerning humane understanding microform, Solid philosophy asserted, against the fancies of the ideists, or, The method to science farther illustrated with reflexions on Mr. Locke''s Essay concerning human understanding / by J.S., and An abridgment of Mr. Locke''s Essay concerning humane [sic] understanding.

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

simple ideas, complex ideas, complex idea, one another, distinct ideas, every one, mixed modes, let us, must needs, one thing, nothing else, real essence, abstract ideas, give us, much less, every thing, real essences, without us, put together, real existence, sensitive spirits, made use, shall find, every man, early english, english books, simple idea, sensible qualities, must necessarily, greatest part, abstract idea, certain knowledge, make use, nominal essence, two ideas, love god, two things, will never, intuitive knowledge, may say, innate principles, books online, general maxims, primary qualities, many times, tell us, taken notice, true knowledge, man may, two sorts

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Scepsis scientifica, or, Confest ignorance, the way to science in an essay of The vanity of dogmatizing, and confident opinion : with a reply to the exceptions of the learned Thomas Albius / by Joseph Glanvill ... An exclusion of scepticks from all title to dispute being an answer to The vanity of dogmatizing / by Thomas White., and The bishop of Worcester''s answer to Mr. Locke''s second letter wherein his notion of ideas is prov''d to be inconsistent with itself, and with the articles of the Christian faith..

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:

man, soul, nature, tcp, knowledge, world, truth, body, science, matter, senses, sense, motion, mind, men, ideas, thing, sun, spirits, reason, principles, love, life, god, earth, bodies, aristotle, understanding, thoughts, substances, substance, subject, propositions, power, parts, names, modes, lord, learning, hypothesis, father, existence, divine, discourse, church, christ, chap, certainty, actions, youth

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 ideas, and Reflections upon some passages in a book, entitled reflections upon the conduct of human life. With reference to the study of learning and knowledge. By Edmund Elys. 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?":

ideas, things, knowledge, thing, mind, man, self, men, t, reason, nothing, words, body, way, others, part, nature, parts, one, time, use, truth, notions, love, understanding, name, power, life, minds, names, sense, senses, light, motion, none, kind, place, hath, word, end, evidence, something, objects, sort, ones, doth, object, bodies, rest, terms

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, do, being, were, make, had, know, said, made, has, think, did, say, take, been, see, come, give, makes, find, having, let, call, known, does, am, found, put, called, according, taken, thought, love, set, consider, done, ''s, stand, concerning, go, hath, given, believe, suppose, speak, use

Proper Nouns

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

god, idea, 〉, ◊, 〈, ideas, man, nature, men, world, matter, knowledge, motion, love, notion, certainty, soul, truth, principles, thoughts, c., hath, species, body, essence, sun, christ, chap, power, word, spirits, reason, mr., philosophy, life, thou, existence, aristotle, substances, substance, bodies, faith, qualities, science, church, sense, propositions, gods, earth, modes

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, they, i, we, he, their, them, his, our, you, us, my, her, him, she, its, your, me, themselves, himself, thy, thee, one, ours, theirs, itself, mine, yours, ''s, whereof, l, hers, ourselves, dy''d, yourself, ye, vvith, us''d, t''uch, severall, ●, †, Ε''ΦΗ, whenthey, urg''d, ts, tears, ng, lye, ii

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, more, great, own, many, true, certain, good, several, distinct, much, first, little, clear, different, real, simple, particular, general, common, necessary, most, evident, complex, least, capable, few, whole, new, natural, greater, impossible, proper, best, last, false, old, former, less, better, able, sensible, wise, perfect, like, plain, greatest, present

not, so, then, as, only, more, therefore, very, yet, thus, most, never, up, now, well, out, also, much, first, here, far, all, too, together, even, there, else, ever, still, at, in, no, perhaps, always, again, indeed, often, rather, secondly, otherwise, that, is, down, certainly, sometimes, easily, farther, long, before, 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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