Distant Reader - subject-trials-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 117 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 2,631,400 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 22,490 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:

mr, lord, will, sir, one, king, say, time, may, man, shall, know, now, came, house, thing, lords, law, made, great, must, god, whether, first, court, told, just, make, give, come, never, might, gen, treason, evidence, two, go, take, parliament, men, england, done, witnesses, yet, day, well, tell, went, words, much

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The Tryal of Thomas, Earl of Strafford, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, upon an impeachment of high treason by the Commons then assembled in Parliament, in the name of themselves and of all the Commons in England, begun in Westminster-Hall the 22th of March 1640, and continued before judgment was given until the 10th of May, 1641 shewing the form of parliamentary proceedings in an impeachment of treason : to which is added a short account of some other matters of fact transacted in both houses of Parliament, precedent, concomitant, and subsequent to the said tryal : with some special arguments in law relating to a bill of attainder / faithfully collected, and impartially published, without observation or reflection, by John Rushworth of Lincolnes-Inn, Esq., The tryal of William Viscount Stafford for high treason in conspiring the death of the King, the extirpation of the Protestant religion, the subversion of the government, and introduction of popery into this realm : upon an impeachment by the knights, citizens, and burgesses in Parliament assembled, in the name of themselves and of all the commons of England : begun in Westminster-Hall the 30. day of November 1680, and continued until the 7. of December following, on which day judgment of high treason was given upon him : with the manner of his execution the 29. of the same month., and The proceedings and tryal in the case of the most Reverend Father in God, William, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury and the Right Reverend Fathers in God, William, Lord Bishop of St. Asaph, Francis, Lord Bishop of Ely, John, Lord Bishop of Chichester, Thomas, Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells, Thomas, Lord Bishop of Peterborough, and Jonathan, Lord Bishop of Bristol, in the Court of Kings-Bench at Westminster in Trinity-term in the fourth year of the reign of King James the Second, Annoque Dom. 1688..

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

high treason, english books, early english, sir john, sir william, lord chief, sir george, books online, sir thomas, lord stafford, chief just, take notice, sir tho, page images, lord high, text creation, creation partnership, several times, two witnesses, never saw, lord ch, will give, went away, soveraign lord, high steward, lord howard, sir robert, great deal, one thing, chief justice, one mr, found guilty, sovereign lord, next day, protestant religion, sir miles, take away, every one, will tell, represented either, characters represented, tcp schema, image sets, sir will, sir iohn, will never, sir rob, john friend, lord preston, will take

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are Master Strovvd his speech in Parliament on Tuesday the third of January in reply to the articles of high treason against himselfe, the Lord Kimbolton, Master Pym, Sir Arthur Haselrigg, Master Hambden and Master Hollis exhibited by His Majestie wherein he cleareth himselfe concerning the same, 1642. An appeal of murther from certain unjust judges, lately sitting at the Old Baily to the righteous judge of heaven and earth; and to all sensible English-men, containing a relation of the tryal, behaviour, and death of Mr. William Anderton, executed June 16. 1693. at Tyburn, for pretended high treason., and The whole triall of Mr. Christopher Love, before a pretended high court of justice in Westminster Hall containing the charge of high treason against him ... with the relation of his suffering and his speech and prayer at his death on Tower-hill / published by John Farthing, citizen of London, who took the triall in the said court in short-writing for Mr. Love, and at his own request ; to which is added The tragedy of his triall and death in very elegant verses / by the acute author of Iter boreale..

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:

lord, tcp, king, mr., court, evidence, parliament, law, house, early, prisoner, god, sir, jury, oates, att, witnesses, john, treason, lordship, act, witch, tei, statute, man, majesties, laws, ireland, earl, duke, dugdale, devil, case, steward, robert, majesty, lordships, letter, high, george, england, council, charge, williams, power, petition, pannal, master, lords, kingdom

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 mr, and A full and true account of the proceedings at the sessions of oyer and terminer, holden for the city of London, county of Middlesex, and goal-delivery of Newgate; which began at the Sessions-House in the Old-Bayly, on Wednesday, April 26. and ended on Fryday, April 28, 1682 Where were many remarkable proceedings, but more especially the tryal of James Boucher, and Walter Archer, for killing the bayliff of Westminster. As also, in relation to the person accused for getting his daughter with child: together, with the names of those that received sentence of death, the number of those burn''d in the hand, transported, and vvhip''d. 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?":

time, man, thing, evidence, day, words, nothing, men, lordship, things, self, matter, way, money, witnesses, hath, part, lordships, others, hand, jury, life, person, t, place, letter, case, people, question, house, body, death, persons, reason, order, king, charge, name, text, times, years, account, design, gentlemen, year, business, truth, kings, purpose, word

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:

was, be, is, have, did, had, were, said, are, do, say, been, being, know, came, made, told, make, give, come, go, take, done, tell, went, am, think, heard, see, says, speak, taken, read, put, desire, given, sent, brought, saw, let, ask, remember, prove, believe, has, found, asked, call, hear, knew

Proper Nouns

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

mr., lord, l., sir, king, c., j., lords, god, law, gen., court, house, parliament, england, treason, ireland, h., john, prisoner, oates, earl, london, william, strafford, justice, hath, majesty, kingdom, council, att, colledge, tcp, dr., thomas, ch, act, witnesses, high, oath, statute, commons, plot, case, dugdale, witness, government, christ, tryal, bar

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, he, it, you, my, his, him, they, them, me, your, we, their, her, our, she, himself, us, themselves, thy, its, thee, one, theirs, yours, mine, ours, ''em, ye, ''s, vvhat, yourself, myself, itself, hers, em, l, herself, ay, us''d, thou, ourselves, hee, yourselves, whereof, whence, there, shou''d, severall, s

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, great, same, own, guilty, more, good, many, several, true, first, last, much, little, next, particular, present, whole, general, late, ready, best, fit, common, second, pleased, sure, high, early, most, very, english, false, least, better, new, able, former, full, private, long, certain, sufficient, plain, greater, clear, old, ill, free

not, so, then, now, there, very, here, never, just, as, up, only, therefore, well, out, in, again, ever, more, away, before, down, first, yet, over, also, much, most, together, too, all, far, afterwards, on, thus, long, further, off, n''t, about, indeed, else, likewise, at, truly, no, still, humbly, sometimes, rather

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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