Distant Reader - subject-therapeutics-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 14 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 136,132 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 9,723 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 83. 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:

blood, may, de, phlebotomy, will, one, much, doth, great, yet, nature, disease, many, text, feaver, made, tcp, body, first, though, man, pox, small, non, sometimes, use, patient, make, cure, let, time, must, diseases, thereof, doctor, physicians, us, without, english, est, well, physician, others, also, practise, eebo, good, pest, case, take

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are An epistolary discourse concerning phlebotomy in opposition to G. Thomson pseudo-chymist, a pretended disciple of the Lord Verulam : wherein the nature of the blood, and the effects of blood-letting, are enquired into, and the practice thereof experimentally justified (according as it is used by judicious physicians) : [bracket] in the pest, and pestilential diseases, in the small pox, in the scurvey, in pleurisies, and in several other diseases / by Henry Stubbe ..., Approved medicines of little cost, to preserve health and also to cure those that are sick provided for the souldiers knap-sack and the country mans closet / written by Richard Elkes, Gent. ..., and Some observations made upon the Bengala bean imported from the Indies shewing its admirable virtues in curing all sorts of hemorrages, and particularly spitting of blood / written by a doctor of physick in the countrey to one of his patients in London..

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

small pox, early english, english books, de febr, books online, observations made, page images, text creation, creation partnership, let blood, de pest, early works, image sets, represented either, tcp schema, characters represented, come forth, admirable virtues, lord bacon, de venae, doctor sydenham, van der, will never, doctor willis, encoded text, work described, providing financial, proquest page, bit group, encoded edition, pfs batch, indies shewing, commercial purposes, de variolis, institutions providing, image set, true nature, now take, batch review, doctor whitaker, markup reviewed, financial support, let us, text transcribed, asking permission, images scanned, without asking, creative commons, large quantities, xml conversion

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are An epistolary discourse concerning phlebotomy in opposition to G. Thomson pseudo-chymist, a pretended disciple of the Lord Verulam : wherein the nature of the blood, and the effects of blood-letting, are enquired into, and the practice thereof experimentally justified (according as it is used by judicious physicians) : [bracket] in the pest, and pestilential diseases, in the small pox, in the scurvey, in pleurisies, and in several other diseases / by Henry Stubbe ... Some observations made upon the serpent stones imported from India shewing their admirable virtues in curing malignant spotted feavers / written by a countrey physitian to Dr. Burwell, president of the Colledge of Physitians in London., and Some observations made upon the root called serapias or salep, imported from Turkey shewing its admirable virtues in preventing womens miscarriages / written by a Doctor of Physick in the countrey to his friend in London..

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, early, root, world, willis, sydenham, stomach, small, roses, remedies, rec, pox, pleurisie, plague, physick, physician, phlebotomy, pestilence, pest, patient, nose, nature, method, medicines, medicaments, man, lungs, lord, letter, hypothesis, humours, hippocrates, helmontian, heart, galenists, flux, feaver, eyes, english, ecebolius, doctor, disease, cure, crisis, celsus, blood, bacon, authority, art, argument

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 blood, and Some observations made upon the serpent stones imported from India shewing their admirable virtues in curing malignant spotted feavers / written by a countrey physitian to Dr. Burwell, president of the Colledge of Physitians in London. 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?":

blood, t, p., body, man, nature, doth, time, disease, others, text, diseases, part, case, parts, practise, use, reason, cases, self, hath, texts, observations, matter, men, thing, way, persons, cure, beginning, works, course, books, characters, nothing, physician, times, work, water, strength, life, cause, images, day, xml, manner, danger, years, humours, bodies

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, do, were, had, been, did, being, made, make, let, take, come, say, see, know, give, cured, according, encoded, am, taken, called, used, found, concerning, said, put, seem, observed, use, done, think, written, bleed, having, find, seen, read, given, shewing, proceed, bleeding, produce, cure, create, based

Proper Nouns

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

〉, ◊, c., 〈, de, phlebotomy, l., tcp, feaver, pox, small, patient, physicians, ●, est, doctor, physick, pest, sect, nature, disease, hath, cum, text, english, aut, london, tei, plague, eebo, oxford, febr, vel, physician, john, galen, sanguinis, mr., method, si, medic, ex, non, sanguis, quae, world, qui, obs, dr., venae

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, i, he, his, they, their, them, we, him, you, my, our, its, her, me, us, she, himself, your, themselves, one, ours, theirs, whereof, tollit, thy, obs, mine, iis, ido

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, great, many, more, same, much, first, good, little, several, true, sick, early, certain, general, most, english, own, present, greater, due, new, necessary, doth, dangerous, best, whole, least, different, violent, pestilential, manifest, evident, available, like, evil, old, malignant, large, usual, second, able, particular, last, admirable, requisite, possible, common, natural

not, so, then, more, most, as, sometimes, very, only, much, also, thus, thereof, well, out, now, yet, never, even, therefore, ever, here, there, frequently, often, first, up, too, rather, forth, in, otherwise, less, all, usually, thereby, far, away, no, together, therein, once, again, commonly, almost, particularly, off, generally, over, online

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.