Distant Reader - subject-ohioRiver-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:"Ohio River". 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 8 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 388,995 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 48,624 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 80. 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, river, henry, now, ohio, little, two, great, time, boat, new, us, miles, water, long, sandy, man, made, men, came, like, day, will, back, way, well, bob, much, many, night, first, must, see, white, good, old, indian, three, feet, just, might, shore, away, come, saw, hundred, side, knew, every, place

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The Riflemen of the Ohio: A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River", Four Months in a Sneak-Box A Boat Voyage of 2600 Miles Down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and Along the Gulf of Mexico, and Afloat on the Ohio An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo.

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

new orleans, adam colfax, united states, ohio river, major braithwaite, blue jacket, tom ross, new york, long jim, shiftless one, one hundred, ohio valley, two hundred, two miles, white lightning, daniel boone, henry ware, hundred miles, white men, fort prescott, braxton wyatt, every one, west virginia, new jersey, three miles, hundred yards, next morning, next day, replied henry, white man, hundred feet, three hundred, let us, red men, fort pitt, five hundred, either side, uncle forman, come back, seth cole, thousand miles, four miles, ohio company, years ago, jim hart, lake erie, may th, henry looked, kentucky shore, two boys

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The Riflemen of the Ohio: A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" Four Months in a Sneak-Box A Boat Voyage of 2600 Miles Down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and Along the Gulf of Mexico, and Waterways of Westward Expansion - The Ohio River and its Tributaries.

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:

ohio, new, west, virginia, river, pittsburg, mr., kentucky, indians, cincinnati, united, states, mississippi, mile, little, island, god, fort, creek, boone, boat, wyatt, wyandot, western, water, washington, ware, uncle, tom, timmendiquas, time, thy, thomas, st., sol, sandy, ross, pittsburgh, pilgrim, pennsylvania, paul, pat, orleans, o''mara, o''er, note, natchez, monongahela, mexico, man

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 river, and The Emigrant or Reflections While Descending the Ohio 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:

river, ohio, miles - Four Months in a Sneak-Box A Boat Voyage of 2600 Miles Down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and Along the Gulf of Mexico
henry, said, sandy - The Riflemen of the Ohio: A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River"
forman, captain, new - Narrative of a Journey Down the Ohio and Mississippi in 1789-90
thy, like, er - The Emigrant or Reflections While Descending the Ohio
board, pittsburg, coal - Three Days on the Ohio River

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?":

river, time, boat, miles, water, man, men, day, way, night, feet, shore, side, place, forest, boats, country, eyes, head, fire, life, hand, bank, stream, land, days, one, camp, years, people, boy, wind, face, morning, tree, woods, home, mouth, boys, others, brother, fleet, part, hour, ground, village, house, warriors, current, trees

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:

was, had, were, is, be, are, have, said, been, do, did, made, came, has, see, come, knew, being, saw, found, ''s, seemed, make, go, heard, took, passed, went, know, looked, take, left, find, think, felt, called, having, seen, get, say, gave, asked, turned, keep, replied, told, going, give, built, became

Proper Nouns

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

henry, ohio, _, sandy, bob, new, indians, river, mr., sol, kentucky, mississippi, major, boone, timmendiquas, fort, west, shif''less, orleans, island, pittsburg, virginia, indian, paul, creek, tom, forman, colfax, states, united, cincinnati, adam, blue, st., jim, captain, gulf, girty, braithwaite, wyandot, louisville, wyandots, jacket, colonel, great, washington, white, chapter, general, ross

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, his, i, they, we, their, him, you, them, our, its, my, us, me, her, himself, she, your, themselves, itself, one, myself, ''em, thy, ourselves, ours, em, herself, theirs, thee, yourself, ''s, mine, yours, hez, uv, hisself, yew, ye, twon''t, thinkin, ob, mississippi,--or, lieu, hev, handed.--the, f, bonnet=, be!--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?"

little, great, other, many, good, more, old, long, white, few, first, new, much, young, indian, last, such, same, large, small, several, own, low, high, full, strong, dark, red, wild, right, ready, western, next, early, half, heavy, most, best, deep, second, french, fine, sure, whole, true, beautiful, narrow, black, wide, better

not, so, now, up, then, out, here, down, as, only, back, again, well, too, n''t, just, away, there, more, once, very, still, never, far, soon, even, on, most, about, ever, also, much, off, all, almost, perhaps, yet, always, long, over, in, however, often, thus, already, first, no, enough, later, suddenly

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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