Distant Reader - subject-puritans-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 29 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,564,247 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 53,939 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 92. 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, will, christ, may, church, one, shall, man, men, lord, yet, good, us, things, first, day, must, much, now, life, many, like, make, therefore, without, holy, spirit, doth, time, word, though, others, great, world, made, faith, power, doe, every, heart, love, bee, grace, also, churches, haue, sin, death, gods, say

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The works of George Swinnock, M.A. containing these several treatises ..., Ohel or Beth-shemesh A tabernacle for the sun, or, Irenicum evangelicum : an idea of church-discipline in the theorick and practick parts, which come forth first into the world as bridegroom and bride ... by whom you will have the totum essentiale of a true Gospel-church state according to Christs rules and order left us when he ascended ... : published for the benefit of all gathered churches, more especially in England, Ireland and Scotland / by John Rogers ..., and The godly mans picture drawn with a scripture-pensil, or, Some characteristical notes of a man that shall go to heaven by Thomas Watson ....

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

holy ghost, godly man, let us, jesus christ, holy spirit, one another, every one, must needs, iesus christ, god will, english books, early english, every man, every day, new testament, lords day, will make, books online, roman non, take heed, will never, may bee, whole church, good works, set forth, god himselfe, god doth, wicked men, man may, shall bee, good things, lord jesus, bring forth, last day, first day, one body, eternall life, sabbath day, may say, may well, take away, taken away, vnto god, will give, gods word, page images, many things, haue beene, one day, much lesse

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are The godly mans picture drawn with a scripture-pensil, or, Some characteristical notes of a man that shall go to heaven by Thomas Watson ... To his reverend and much respected good friend, Mr. John Goodwin: be these I pray presented., and Truth triumphing over falshood, antiquity over novelty. Or, The first part of a just and seasonable vindication of the undoubted ecclesiasticall iurisdiction, right, legislative, coercive power of Christian emperors, kings, magistrates, parliaments, in all matters of religion, church-government, discipline, ceremonies, manners: summoning of, presiding, moderating in councells, synods; and ratifying their canons, determinations, decrees: as likewise of lay-mens right both to sit and vote in councells; ... In refutation of Mr. Iohn Goodwins Innocencies Triumph: my deare brother Burtons Vindication of churches, commonly called Independent: and of all anti-monarchicall, anti-Parliamentall, anti-synodicall, and anarchicall paradoxes of papists, prelates, Anabaptists, Arminians, Socinians, Brownists, or Independents: whose old and new objections to the contrary, are here fully answered. / By William Prynne, of Lincolnes Inne, Esquire..

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, church, lord, christ, law, king, christian, spirit, father, religion, tcp, saints, rom, man, ghost, cor, word, mat, holy, gods, ecclesiasticall, churches, bishops, thing, scriptures, scripture, psal, parliament, mr., kingdome, government, gospel, good, faith, court, act, sun, state, sonne, son, sabbath, princes, priests, prayer, ministers, isa, elect, apostle, angels, thy

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 True peace, or, A moderate discourse to compose the unsettled consciences and greatest differences in ecclesiastical affaires written long since by the no less famous then learned Sir Francis Bacon ... 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, day, p., life, time, others, heart, power, world, death, way, sin, thing, grace, word, body, hath, reason, faith, love, soul, people, thy, saints, name, truth, end, self, part, nature, c., nothing, doth, glory, religion, light, l., sins, respect, place, church, cause, none, persons, manner, words, hee, selfe

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, had, make, do, being, did, made, say, let, come, called, see, said, know, take, been, hath, am, give, bee, set, done, according, put, given, seeing, makes, taken, keep, found, doe, live, go, doth, call, bring, think, blessed, love, read, haue, pray, brought, s, having

Proper Nouns

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

god, christ, 〉, ◊, thou, 〈, church, lord, c., hath, spirit, cor, gods, ●, doe, holy, father, king, rom, heaven, churches, l., law, haue, mr., wee, mat, christian, word, christs, hast, bee, christians, yea, faith, de, parliament, psal, gospel, lords, est, act, lib, s., ecclesiasticall, owne, councell, ye, hee, bishops

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, i, they, he, their, them, my, him, our, we, thy, me, you, us, thee, her, your, themselves, himself, its, she, mine, one, theirs, ours, ye, vp, vnto, yours, †, yee, whereof, s, non, l, ''s, whosoever, thou, thēselues, hee, g, elias, ●, vvhat, qui, ng, ne, nay, herself

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?"

such, other, good, many, great, same, more, true, own, much, first, holy, whole, little, godly, last, most, least, full, best, better, new, greater, wicked, able, saith, present, greatest, common, spiritual, particular, wise, like, second, very, old, necessary, former, few, glorious, false, free, high, fit, doth, outward, eternal, sweet, due, christian

not, so, then, more, now, therefore, up, as, most, also, yet, out, well, first, thus, onely, only, much, never, ever, together, too, very, here, in, away, forth, rather, even, there, all, hence, down, far, before, indeed, long, secondly, off, often, else, especially, no, again, sometimes, whatsoever, that, nt, surely, still

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.