Distant Reader - subject-roads-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 5 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 69,043 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 13,808 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:

may, pence, june, table, every, shillings, day, text, april, tcp, year, find, will, london, years, first, pound, half, like, two, july, weight, pag, number, shall, farthings, english, carriage, one, rates, eebo, peny, month, st, febr, hundred, places, three, parts, sun, street, early, letter, letters, example, months, ounce, books, tei, days

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Vade mecum, or The necessary companion Containing, 1. Sir S. Morland''s Perpetual almanack, in copper plates, with many useful tables proper thereto. 2. Christian and regal years compar''d from the Norman conquest. 3. The reduction of weights, measures. 4. The ready casting up any number of farthings, half-pence, pence, shillings, nobles, marks, and guinneys. 5. The interest, and rebate of money, the forebearance, discompt, and purchase of annuities. 6. The rates of post-letters, both inland and outland, with the post-stages. 7. The usual and authorized rates or fares for coach-men, carr-men, and water-men., A proclamation to restrain the excessive carriages in wagons and four-wheeled carts to the destruction of high-ways, and By the King, a proclamation for suspending the prosecution upon that part of the late act of Parliament for enlarging and repairing of common high-ways, as concerneth the breadth of the tyre of wheels.

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

april may, may june, may may, early english, english books, june july, books online, pence half, june june, per cent, pence farthing, like carriage, hundred weight, may febr, sun sets, rises sun, sun rises, like distance, single double, text creation, three farthings, july april, creation partnership, two shillings, dominical letter, page images, june febr, october novem, pounds years, sets sun, january february, pence three, august septem, treble ounce, table shewing, june april, march april, every load, july august, june may, charles ii, image sets, double letter, every double, every single, double treble, tcp schema, represented either, characters represented, every ounce

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Advertisement anent the reparation of high-ways and bridges Vade mecum, or The necessary companion Containing, 1. Sir S. Morland''s Perpetual almanack, in copper plates, with many useful tables proper thereto. 2. Christian and regal years compar''d from the Norman conquest. 3. The reduction of weights, measures. 4. The ready casting up any number of farthings, half-pence, pence, shillings, nobles, marks, and guinneys. 5. The interest, and rebate of money, the forebearance, discompt, and purchase of annuities. 6. The rates of post-letters, both inland and outland, with the post-stages. 7. The usual and authorized rates or fares for coach-men, carr-men, and water-men., and Die Veneris, 24 die Augusti, 1660. The Lords in Parliament taking notice, that the streets, lanes, and other publike passages in or neer the cities of London and Westminster ... are very much out of repair ...

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:

tcp, wheels, realm, pence, parliament, june

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 10, and Vade mecum, or The necessary companion Containing, 1. Sir S. Morland''s Perpetual almanack, in copper plates, with many useful tables proper thereto. 2. Christian and regal years compar''d from the Norman conquest. 3. The reduction of weights, measures. 4. The ready casting up any number of farthings, half-pence, pence, shillings, nobles, marks, and guinneys. 5. The interest, and rebate of money, the forebearance, discompt, and purchase of annuities. 6. The rates of post-letters, both inland and outland, with the post-stages. 7. The usual and authorized rates or fares for coach-men, carr-men, and water-men. 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?":

〈, table, pence, text, years, day, year, carriage, d, shillings, places, c, months, e, texts, g, days, parts, men, l., example, books, peny, work, pound, ounce, distance, characters, works, ways, rates, money, f, xml, street, page, month, b, interest, rate, number, images, image, farthing, time, title, pounds, edition, tables, letter

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, find, 〈, was, were, been, take, being, said, encoded, sets, rises, made, found, do, shewing, exceeding, based, set, seek, make, has, according, published, having, given, paid, marked, -, taken, represented, printed, following, created, create, corrected, used, remaining, known, know, included, casting, begin, use, providing, multiply, meet

Proper Nouns

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

◊, 〉, d., 〈, s., l., may, m., h., june, pence, q., april, tcp, london, july, shillings, pag, sun, st., febr, weight, farthings, pound, c., england, carr, quar, number, new, mar., january, day, year, text, lord, tei, oxford, john, eebo, a, english, westminster, rates, march, letters, fraction, dominical, annuities, parliament

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?"

i, it, our, you, their, them, his, your, they, he, my, we, me, its, us, him, themselves, himself, her

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, first, like, early, double, full, english, second, such, same, more, last, many, high, available, whole, ready, single, due, third, square, half, general, common, useful, illegible, greater, great, usual, true, textual, several, ordinary, next, much, less, left, right, proper, own, moveable, keyboarded, good, fourth, foregoing, financial, excessive, commercial, aforesaid, worth

not, so, then, up, also, therefore, thus, only, now, very, online, down, thereof, ever, as, there, out, off, early, usually, in, here, even, especially, always, above, together, once, next, never, much, most, first, well, variously, therein, sometimes, respectfully, readily, presently, over, notably, more, mainly, before, accurately, whatsoever, thereby, otherwise, longer

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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