Distant Reader - subject-navajoIndians-gutenberg

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 2021-06-07 by Eric Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>. The carrel was created using the Distant Reader gutenberg process, and the input was the result of a query applied to a local mirror of Project Gutenberg -- facet_subject:"Navajo Indians". Then, for future reference, the results were saved to a Zip file complete with rudimentary bibliographics. The name of the file is input-file.zip. The Zip file was then unpacked and the contents saved to a cache as well as a directory 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 4 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 279,616 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 69,904 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 86. 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:

one, two, people, will, made, man, white, came, come, old, see, time, men, four, water, great, day, go, now, navaho, little, back, like, us, went, may, first, indians, house, mountain, many, new, place, three, found, way, called, night, long, west, among, indian, east, feet, days, navahoes, must, side, another, left

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Navaho Legends, Through Our Unknown Southwest The Wonderland of the United States—Little Known and Unappreciated—The Home of the Cliff Dweller and the Hopi, the Forest Ranger and the Navajo,—The Lure of the Painted Desert, and Captured by the Navajos.

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

new mexico, old man, santa fe, four times, national forests, san juan, four days, one another, painted desert, next morning, rio grande, new york, place called, san xavier, let us, casa grande, la paz, first man, white man, fourth time, captain bayard, white shell, went back, alien gods, united states, origin legend, night chant, deer raiser, young man, came back, house made, mountain chant, will find, young woman, white men, one day, san antonio, corporal frank, feet high, last night, next day, two days, enchanted mesa, san francisco, lower world, tom clary, young men, first woman, see note, juan river

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Navaho Legends Through Our Unknown Southwest The Wonderland of the United States—Little Known and Unappreciated—The Home of the Cliff Dweller and the Hopi, the Forest Ranger and the Navajo,—The Lure of the Painted Desert, and Captured by the Navajos.

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:

indians, new, mexico, illustration, arizona, xavier, woman, wind, white, west, water, vic, tom, tiéholtsodi, taos, sun, spanish, spain, southwest, sergeant, santa, san, rock, raiser, people, pecos, paz, palace, painted, nayénezgani, navajos, navajo, navahoes, navaho, national, mr., mountain, moki, mission, mesa, manuel, man, legend, kisáni, juan, indian, house, hopi, henry, hastséyalti

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 said, and Through Our Unknown Southwest The Wonderland of the United States—Little Known and Unappreciated—The Home of the Cliff Dweller and the Hopi, the Forest Ranger and the Navajo,—The Lure of the Painted Desert 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:

said, people, navaho - Navaho Legends
old, new, white - Through Our Unknown Southwest The Wonderland of the United States—Little Known and Unappreciated—The Home of the Cliff Dweller and the Hopi, the Forest Ranger and the Navajo,—The Lure of the Painted Desert
frank, henry, said - Captured by the Navajos
bah, billy, mother - The Little Indian Weaver
dragging, habits, hurry - The Little Indian Weaver

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?":

people, man, time, men, day, water, way, days, night, place, house, feet, side, mountain, boys, corn, fire, name, miles, world, head, camp, stone, morning, boy, women, gods, woman, trail, life, one, land, nothing, east, years, north, ground, mountains, earth, west, top, end, story, hand, lodge, work, home, log, part, times

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, was, are, had, were, be, have, said, been, has, do, made, came, come, see, go, went, did, found, called, make, told, saw, take, asked, know, say, put, took, seen, heard, find, tell, left, began, think, set, get, used, looked, let, got, going, sent, does, taken, given, being, done, thought

Proper Nouns

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

navaho, indians, _, navahoes, new, frank, san, henry, bah, navajo, mexico, billy, mr., coyote, god, white, west, santa, forests, navajos, nayénezgani, america, desert, arizona, mountain, cañon, grande, fe, vic, national, juan, east, indian, father, taos, la, hastséyalti, southwest, rio, woman, tsi''ni, first, mesa, house, mission, brenda, sun, clary, water, apaches

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?"

he, it, they, you, i, his, their, we, them, she, her, him, me, my, your, our, us, its, himself, themselves, yourself, one, itself, myself, herself, ourselves, ''em, yours, theirs, ours, mine, ''s, ye, em, a.--they, yéi.--there, yidisél, yell, ya, whence, uv, tse`lakaíia, ts, there, ni, life,--his, hers, danger,--the, calling,--the, basketry.--they

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, old, little, great, white, many, such, more, same, indian, good, own, young, long, last, few, high, first, black, yellow, sacred, next, red, beautiful, fourth, different, blue, small, spanish, new, much, latter, dark, big, large, second, whole, dead, dry, several, lower, fine, third, wild, ancient, modern, right, open, western, hot

not, up, out, then, down, here, so, now, again, only, n''t, back, there, as, never, away, off, very, still, more, soon, too, on, in, well, all, also, once, far, just, thus, first, always, over, much, ever, long, often, most, perhaps, before, almost, together, home, happily, even, yet, about, around, usually

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.