Distant Reader - subject-law-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 67 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 4,868,745 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 72,667 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 88. 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:

law, shall, de, may, one, act, case, yet, le, made, man, king, will, time, though, first, without, est, also, common, court, right, therefore, lands, see, good, cap, land, found, contra, statute, god, lord, called, men, part, make, kings, writ, action, two, lib, might, now, ad, non, another, en, within, reason

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Fortescutus illustratus, or, A commentary on that nervous treatise, De laudibus legum Angliæ, written by Sir John Fortescue, Knight ... by Edward Waterhous, Esquire., Reports of diverse choice cases in law taken by those late and most judicious prothonotaries of the Common Pleas, Richard Brownlow & John Goldesborough ; with directions how to proceed in many intricate actions both reall and personall ... ; also a most perfect and exact table, shewing appositely the contents of the whole book., and Vindiciae legis, or, A vindication of the morall law and the covenants, from the errours of Papists, Arminians, Socinians, and more especially, Antinomians in XXX lectures, preached at Laurence-Jury, London / by Anthony Burgess ....

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

common law, lords found, kings bench, en le, common pleas, act par, est un, civil law, que il, eodem die, que le, le roy, cest estatute, chief justice, taken away, moy semble, man may, take away, anno hen, pursuer answered, whole court, contra laird, early english, english books, de cest, il est, le tenant, si le, venire facias, per le, every man, scire facias, letters patents, appearand heir, que est, books online, de son, pur ceo, ceo que, rent charge, nisi prius, de ceo, common lawe, every one, singular successors, bona fide, anno edw, three years, sir william, tells us

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Plowden''s quaeries, or, A moot-book of choice cases useful for the young students of the common law / englished, methodized, and enlarged by H.B. Les termes de la ley; or, Certain difficult and obscure words and terms of the common laws and statutes of this realm now in use, expounded and explained Now corrected and enlarged. With very great additions throughout the whole book, never printed in any other impression., and The lavvyers light: or, A due direction for the study of the law for methode. Choyce of bookes moderne. Selection of authours of more antiquitie. Application of either. Accommodation of diuers other vsefull requisits. All tending to the speedy and more easie attayning of the knowledge of the common law of this kingdome. With necessary cautions against certaine abuses or ouersights, aswell in the practitioner as student. Written by the reuerend and learned professor thereof, I.D. To which is annexed for the affinitie of the subiect, another treatise, called The vse of the law..

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:

law, lord, king, court, statute, parliament, laws, act, justice, common, church, land, tcp, lands, tenant, god, estate, case, lease, kingdom, england, writ, wife, goods, english, bishop, sheriff, rent, edward, defendant, action, realm, plaintiff, people, man, majesty, london, civil, city, record, reason, office, nation, majesties, lords, knights, judgment, husband, henry, government

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 law, and Vindiciae legis, or, A vindication of the morall law and the covenants, from the errours of Papists, Arminians, Socinians, and more especially, Antinomians in XXX lectures, preached at Laurence-Jury, London / by Anthony Burgess ... 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?":

man, time, case, cap, part, men, years, p., words, reason, ad, thing, life, day, kings, things, place, person, action, others, word, right, use, hath, power, death, way, land, goods, rent, possession, law, people, lands, cause, doth, year, ca, money, name, persons, cases, nothing, debt, issue, matter, payment, nature, party, son

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, was, are, have, were, had, being, made, said, did, do, found, been, see, called, make, take, taken, having, given, granted, according, done, come, brought, say, has, give, hath, put, pay, answered, makes, used, set, know, let, hold, alleadged, enter, held, find, prove, concerning, seems, bound, think, declared, adjudged

Proper Nouns

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

law, 〉, ◊, 〈, c., de, act, le, king, court, god, lord, est, contra, statute, h., lib, lands, lords, parliament, fol, writ, un, land, case, que, ●, ou, common, b., justice, anno, hath, defendant, l., heir, plaintiff, england, e., tenant, sir, al, laws, i., il, fee, father, action, del, church

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, his, he, they, their, them, him, i, our, her, we, you, himself, us, my, she, themselves, me, your, its, thy, one, thee, theirs, ours, mine, vp, ay, whereof, ye, non, na, yours, itself, herself, ''s, vnto, tollit, us''d, ''em, em, l, hers, ne, hee, terminum, severall, s, nr̄e, jus

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, good, first, own, great, common, many, more, sufficient, whole, second, much, old, true, new, due, certain, free, several, former, general, ancient, void, third, last, like, lyable, particular, special, necessary, non, present, most, next, full, least, right, ordinary, proper, greater, publick, better, false, little, lawful, personal, best, contrary

not, so, then, also, only, therefore, now, as, more, here, well, yet, there, thereof, onely, first, most, thus, out, up, very, otherwise, much, in, never, away, even, that, is, before, far, ever, thereby, too, likewise, rather, down, sometimes, still, especially, together, just, therein, again, thereupon, afterwards, forth, further, long, else

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.