Distant Reader - subject-universityOfOxford-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 44 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 1,669,406 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 37,941 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 82. 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:

coll, lond, time, one, afterwards, qu, year, church, dr, made, ch, oct, will, also, tho, great, oxon, john, written, joh, university, printed, years, several, became, first, published, book, see, among, two, may, author, london, sir, son, arts, place, buried, mr, near, yet, bach, admitted, much, england, died, born, day, man

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are Athenæ Oxonienses. Vol. 2. an exact history of all the writers and bishops who have had their education in the most ancient and famous University of Oxford, from the fifteenth year of King Henry the Seventh, Dom. 1500, to the end of the year 1690 representing the birth, fortune, preferment, and death of all those authors and prelates, the great accidents of their lives, and the fate and character of their writings : to which are added, the Fasti, or, Annals, of the said university, for the same time ..., Athenæ Oxonienses. Vol. 1. an exact history of all the writers and bishops who have had their education in the most ancient and famous University of Oxford, from the fifteenth year of King Henry the Seventh, Dom. 1500, to the end of the year 1690 representing the birth, fortune, preferment, and death of all those authors and prelates, the great accidents of their lives, and the fate and character of their writings : to which are added, the Fasti, or, Annals, of the said university, for the same time ..., and The Vniversity of Oxfords plea refuted, or, A full answer to a late printed paper intituled, The priviledges of the University of Oxford in point of visitation together with the universities answer to the summons of the visitors ... / by William Prynne, Esq. ....

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

sixteen hundred, new coll, latter end, aged years, yet seen, may see, fifteen hundred, actually created, johns coll, man born, civil law, commonly called, several years, book intit, holy orders, see among, several times, year following, several sermons, two years, exeter coll, sir tho, near london, english books, early english, grammar learning, merton coll, left behind, sir will, book entit, majesties restauration, several things, made one, jesus coll, queens coll, shall tell, oriel coll, afterwards bishop, hundred seventy, tells us, hundred sixty, books online, many years, sir joh, hundred fifty, hundred eighty, thing else, sir john, one degree, new inn

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are At the Committee of Lords and Commons for reformation of the University of Oxford Reasons of the present judgement of the Vniversity of Oxford, concerning [brace] The Solemne League and Covenant. The Negative Oath. The Ordinances concerning discipline and vvorship. Approved by generall consent in a full convocation, 1. Jun. 1647. and presented to consideration., and A third and fourth part of Pegasus: taught by Bankes his ghost to dance in the Dorick moode, to the tune of Lachrymæ. In two letters from Oxford, July 1. 1648..

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, oxford, university, church, parliament, king, lord, religion, covenant, bishop, house, government, doctor, coll, reader, prince, oxon, oath, mr., master, london, law, july, hall, early, dr., commons, christian, chancellour, cambridge, book, author, article, york, writers, wife, visitors, visitation, trin, tower, thomas, thom, tho, student, son, sir, sermons, september, school, rob

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 coll, and Pegasus, or, The flying horse from Oxford bringing the proceedings of the visitours and other Bedlamites there, by command of the Earle of Mongomery. 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, year, coll, lond, years, author, place, book, day, person, tho, death, p., things, ch, man, length, degree, end, books, beginning, name, part, life, house, t, arts, way, parts, men, others, hath, times, month, oxon, body, kings, order, learning, son, works, mention''d, title, age, religion, thing, ad, thence, answer, hand

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, is, had, being, be, said, were, made, have, written, are, became, been, published, did, printed, buried, admitted, see, died, born, called, took, hath, know, following, having, left, created, concerning, went, tell, learned, taken, elected, came, put, translated, sent, preached, seen, educated, find, succeeded, lived, set, gave, done, do, dying

Proper Nouns

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

c., qu, dr., coll, church, s., john, oct, joh, university, ch, oxon, london, lond, sir, mr., bach, d., england, will, bishop, k., king, son, parliament, law, hall, master, tho, lord, english, div, rob, arts, m., cambridge, de, magd, fellow, st., jo, hen, rich, doct, july, may, a., 〉, new, god

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?"

he, his, him, i, it, their, them, they, our, you, himself, we, us, her, my, me, themselves, your, its, she, thy, one, theirs, thee, ib, ''s, ours, mine, hic, u, s, em, †, yours, treateth, there, p, e, bachelaurs, ye, y, whosoever, vp, ut, urg''d, twelf, ts, transcrib''d, tam, mself

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?"

same, great, other, several, first, more, many, last, such, good, own, second, certain, much, rich, little, former, large, true, most, latter, publick, new, next, late, excellent, eminent, least, old, third, present, whole, english, famous, short, common, zealous, extant, noble, holy, private, poor, full, general, high, worthy, younger, chief, best, young

not, afterwards, then, also, so, there, now, soon, most, only, very, before, yet, much, up, sometimes, about, well, out, thereof, as, more, therefore, near, especially, after, lately, again, therein, first, never, ever, in, elsewhere, thus, actually, together, commonly, else, here, down, too, mostly, rather, away, partly, long, far, always, particularly

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.