Distant Reader - subject-naturalTheology-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 6 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 862,259 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 143,709 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:

god, man, will, one, may, doth, men, us, world, must, nature, good, yet, things, first, much, great, therefore, body, self, without, many, reason, natural, shall, parts, earth, thing, water, make, life, power, cause, nothing, though, matter, made, another, air, every, others, love, now, part, soul, fire, also, say, motion, time

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The reasons of the Christian religion the first part, of godliness, proving by natural evidence the being of God ... : the second part, of Christianity, proving by evidence supernatural and natural, the certain truth of the Christian belief ... / by Richard Baxter ... ; also an appendix defending the soul''s immortality against the Somatists or Epicureans and other pseudo-philosophers., Archelogia philosophica nova, or, New principles of philosophy containing philosophy in general, metaphysicks or ontology, dynamilogy or a discourse of power, religio philosophi or natural theology, physicks or natural philosophy / by Gideon Harvey ..., and A demonstration of the divine authority of the law of nature and of the Christian religion in two parts / by Samuel Parker ....

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

one another, must needs, every man, nothing else, let us, per se, humane nature, christian religion, god doth, moral good, christian faith, first cause, mixt body, holy ghost, man doth, must necessarily, jesus christ, every thing, every one, future state, contained within, much less, wise man, tell us, ultimate end, divine providence, divine nature, theologick good, take notice, may easily, man may, summum bonum, local motion, divine authority, good men, de leg, learned men, one part, take away, telleth us, non ens, innate heat, per accidens, incrassated air, natural philosophy, make us, doth consist, mixt bodies, first man, make use

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Of the principles and duties of natural religion two books / by the Right Reverend Father in God, John, late Lord Bishop of Chester ; to which is added, A sermon preached at his funerals, by William Lloyd ... A discourse concerning the beauty of providence in all the rugged passages of it very seasonable to quiet and support the heart in these times of publick confusion / by John Wilkins ..., and The wisdom of God manifested in the works of the creation being the substance of some common places delivered in the chappel of Trinity-College, in Cambridge / by John Ray ....

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, nature, world, providence, power, man, body, sun, soul, religion, reason, philosophers, lord, life, laws, law, earth, divine, church, chap, wisdom, thing, scripture, saviour, roman, resurrection, principles, nations, miracles, matter, light, jews, government, faith, essence, creation, apostle, air, works, west, water, vii, vertue, vacuum, truth, trinity, time, theology, text, testimony

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 Archelogia philosophica nova, or, New principles of philosophy containing philosophy in general, metaphysicks or ontology, dynamilogy or a discourse of power, religio philosophi or natural theology, physicks or natural philosophy / by Gideon Harvey ... 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, men, things, doth, body, thing, parts, self, reason, nature, nothing, water, world, being, p., others, air, part, life, power, time, cause, fire, matter, way, earth, motion, bodies, end, soul, will, truth, manner, understanding, light, sense, hath, place, kind, heat, form, love, mind, religion, object, state, evidence, death, good, means

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, being, do, had, make, been, made, say, did, said, know, think, according, see, take, hath, called, prove, give, believe, doth, come, done, has, having, find, taken, let, move, proved, concerning, answer, given, set, live, seem, am, suppose, put, call, love, appear, wherefore, act, needs

Proper Nouns

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

god, 〉, ◊, 〈, world, c., nature, est, man, hath, christ, de, earth, law, sun, elements, divine, christians, l., chap, church, men, christian, soul, christianity, goodness, saviour, providence, power, government, sea, life, esse, spirit, lord, philosophy, matter, laws, doth, ergo, heaven, mankind, cum, religion, love, lib, thou, justice, natural, faith

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, they, he, their, i, them, we, our, its, him, you, us, himself, themselves, my, your, me, her, she, thy, thee, one, theirs, itself, ours, mine, ye, à, yours, ourselves, non, myself, yourself, whereof, vvhat, thou, re, qui, quae, pelf, oft, o, ni, judg''d, join''d, ice, hitherto, hers, em

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, own, great, many, good, more, first, natural, true, much, greatest, certain, greater, little, common, whole, most, several, real, doth, particular, necessary, least, wise, proper, universal, present, possible, sufficient, second, less, perfect, able, better, last, free, evident, capable, moral, distinct, different, humane, general, holy, evil, false, small, full

not, so, then, more, therefore, most, as, only, much, very, now, also, up, yet, never, here, well, onely, ever, out, first, far, thus, down, again, that, all, even, else, too, is, rather, there, otherwise, together, before, less, no, especially, likewise, alone, certainly, indeed, really, still, away, hence, easily, immediately, naturally

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.