Distant Reader - subject-soul-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 2021-05-25 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 33 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 2,190,345 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 66,374 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:

will, may, one, god, body, us, soul, man, yet, nature, must, shall, now, things, first, reason, thing, self, doth, make, much, therefore, men, without, made, spirit, world, like, see, light, great, though, motion, life, bodies, good, part, time, every, nothing, well, soule, power, way, two, also, matter, fire, say, another

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Two treatises in the one of which the nature of bodies, in the other, the nature of mans soule is looked into in way of discovery of the immortality of reasonable soules., Of bodies and of mans soul to discover the immortality of reasonable souls : with two discourses, Of the powder of sympathy, and, Of the vegetation of plants / by Sir Kenelm Digby, Knight., and A view of the soul, in several tracts ... by a person of quality..

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

let us, nothing else, must needs, one another, every one, shall find, every thing, one part, lett vs, like manner, whole body, must needes, one thing, english books, early english, every man, will make, books online, must necessarily, des cartes, may seem, may say, many times, god will, every part, whole world, make us, will find, euery one, common sense, shall see, will never, make use, page images, dense body, one side, holy spirit, roman non, animal spirits, take notice, creation partnership, man may, text creation, living creatures, will follow, may well, vital spirits, may see, wee may, will appear

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are An historical anatomy of Christian melancholy, sympathetically set forth, in a threefold state of the soul. 1 Endued with grace, 2 ensnared in sin, 3 troubled in conscience. With a concluding meditation on the fourth verse of the ninth chapter of Saint John. / By Edmund Gregory, sometimes Bachelour of Arts in Trin. Coll. Oxon. The infancie of the soule; or, The soule of an infant A subiect neuer yet treated of by any. Which sheweth the infusion there of whiles that the infant resteth in the wombe: the time when, with the manner how. Gathered from the boosome of trueth; begunne in loue, and finished in the desire to posit others. The contnets are in the next page following. William Hill., and Two choice and useful treatises the one, Lux orientalis, or, An enquiry into the opinion of the Eastern sages concerning the praeexistence of souls, being a key to unlock the grand mysteries of providence in relation to mans sin and misery : the other, A discourse of truth / by the late Reverend Dr. Rust ... ; with annotations on them both..

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, body, soul, man, tcp, nature, world, spirit, earth, thing, sun, soule, reason, power, sense, lord, life, motion, men, substance, light, understanding, truth, mind, matter, divine, chap, bodies, time, spirits, scripture, law, imagination, heart, fire, argument, selfe, saviour, religion, laws, justice, intellect, image, grace, good, gods, faith, faculties, elements, doth

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 The spirit of man, or, Some meditations (by way of essay) on the sense of that scripture, 1 Thes. 1:23 ... by Charles Morton ... 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?":

body, man, things, nature, thing, reason, self, part, bodies, nothing, time, men, motion, way, light, life, parts, soul, t, others, power, doth, place, soule, heart, fire, sense, death, water, world, cause, matter, end, manner, truth, hath, selves, one, spirits, substance, mind, kind, blood, souls, partes, selfe, knowledge, eyes, effect, day

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, did, made, see, say, been, has, know, come, take, said, let, according, think, find, give, hath, done, call, set, consider, am, makes, found, having, put, seem, concerning, haue, brought, become, go, called, doth, does, seems, follow, bring, taken, prove, 〈

Proper Nouns

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

god, 〉, ◊, 〈, soul, spirit, thou, world, hath, nature, man, earth, wee, christ, matter, lord, spirits, divine, soule, c., heaven, life, sun, haue, men, sense, souls, doe, body, imagination, fire, gods, pag, hell, love, motion, chap, will, ●, power, reason, substance, mans, owne, psyche, eye, elements, tcp, thee, holy

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, we, his, they, i, their, he, our, them, her, him, us, its, my, you, she, me, thy, your, themselves, himself, thee, one, ours, mine, theirs, ''em, itself, vp, ''s, yours, ye, vnto, herself, l, ourselves, hers, em, shou''d, op''d, †, whereof, myself, s, vvhat, us''d, u, yourself, elias, f

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, more, great, own, first, good, many, little, much, true, whole, greater, least, particular, like, able, most, full, former, new, common, present, very, natural, last, certain, second, several, best, proper, different, pure, doth, outward, better, high, necessary, long, strong, free, due, capable, wise, next, sweet, greatest, contrary, perfect

not, so, then, more, now, as, therefore, yet, most, thus, up, only, also, very, well, out, here, never, much, there, together, too, first, onely, again, still, ever, even, else, away, down, in, far, all, indeed, rather, thereof, no, forth, sometimes, once, likewise, long, easily, often, before, further, otherwise, that, consequently

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.