Distant Reader - subject-tides-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 5 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 392,632 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 78,526 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 95. 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:

sea, one, men, great, land, us, island, captain, small, see, yet, day, came, water, much, made, time, side, two, good, islands, many, also, near, west, east, coast, south, like, river, may, till, wind, leagues, trade, north, ships, will, winds, little, place, way, ship, long, country, now, english, therefore, bay, cape

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are A new voyage round the world describing particularly the isthmus of America, several coasts and islands in the West Indies, the isles of Cape Verd, the passage by Terra del Fuego, the South Sea coasts of Chili, Peru and Mexico, the isle of Guam one of the Ladrones, Mindanao, and other Philippine and East-India islands near Cambodia, China, Formosa, Luconia, Celebes, &c., New Holland, Sumatra, Nicobar Isles, the Cape of Good Hope, and Santa Hellena : their soil, rivers, harbours, plants, fruits, animals, and inhabitants : their customs, religion, government, trade, &c. / by William Dampier ; illustrated with particular maps and draughts., The mutations of the seas: or, A manifest reason given for all the mutations observed in the seas And this by ways so natural, plain, and easie, that every man may understand the manner, and must conclude it to be so. By John Bryantson., and A phylosophical essay treating of the most probable cause of that grand mystery of nature, the flux & reflux, or flowing and ebbing of the sea.

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

th day, captain swan, south seas, west indies, next day, east indies, great many, east side, north side, every day, captain davis, fair weather, fort st, came aboard, great deal, west side, south side, told us, fresh water, much like, fathom water, next morning, every man, went ashore, sandy bay, low land, within land, cape st, great plenty, foot long, good hope, small islands, went away, captain townly, foot high, captain eaton, pretty large, short time, wet season, dry season, west end, east india, pretty high, one side, south sea, never saw, voyage round, three days, vera cruz, pulo condore

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are May it please the King''s most excellent Majesty A phylosophical essay treating of the most probable cause of that grand mystery of nature, the flux & reflux, or flowing and ebbing of the sea, and A correct tide table, shewing the true time of the high-waters at London-Bridg, to every day in the year, 1683 by J. Flamsteed ....

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:

seas, sun, sea, moon, earth, wind, west, water, voyage, turtle, trees, trade, town, tides, tcp, swan, st., spaniards, south, ship, river, reflux, point, opinion, north, men, man, main, line, leagues, land, isle, island, indians, houses, harbour, fruit, fort, fish, english, east, dutch, country, coast, city, captain, cape, canoas, boat, bay

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 sea, and A phylosophical essay treating of the most probable cause of that grand mystery of nature, the flux & reflux, or flowing and ebbing of the sea 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?":

day, men, time, side, way, leagues, place, water, shore, end, ships, places, ship, part, fish, man, sort, people, foot, wind, days, land, thence, t, trees, night, country, mile, course, winds, reason, weather, others, rest, parts, tho, morning, none, motion, voyage, sorts, thing, o., self, ground, plenty, distance, year, thither, manner

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, are, was, have, were, be, had, see, being, came, made, been, do, did, come, go, found, went, make, having, saw, called, take, said, sent, has, took, know, get, told, lay, got, brought, taken, keep, set, find, coming, give, left, seen, kept, put, going, run, making, thought, lying, met, comes

Proper Nouns

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

o., s., sea, c., island, captain, d., land, w., coast, east, west, islands, south, river, north, e., n., bay, cape, spaniards, english, water, trade, indians, town, men, winds, st., wind, seas, indies, moon, canoas, swan, fort, country, dutch, tides, vv, mr., ships, sun, jamaica, canoa, earth, turtle, mindanao, achin, city

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, they, we, i, their, them, our, he, his, us, him, my, its, you, me, her, themselves, she, himself, your, ours, one, itself, theirs, yours, mine, us''d, ourselves, vvith, ts, myself, march''d, l, itfelf, herself, dy''d, ''s, ''em

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, great, small, many, good, little, such, large, same, high, more, much, low, several, long, first, full, most, own, next, dry, black, strong, short, fresh, thick, fair, big, few, best, old, deep, white, common, poor, last, young, new, sandy, clear, hard, general, wet, less, broad, particular, true, better, pleasant, wide

not, very, so, then, there, here, about, as, also, up, out, again, now, only, therefore, much, away, more, in, well, off, never, ashore, down, especially, commonly, sometimes, yet, before, pretty, aboard, even, still, over, all, far, enough, thus, first, always, long, most, often, together, too, ever, soon, presently, afterwards, back

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.