Distant Reader - subject-wales-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 1,132,387 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 80,884 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 87. 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:

anno, de, king, ut, prius, will, county, sir, born, one, ar, made, first, bishop, great, lord, thereof, henry, england, many, may, tho, years, john, bred, st, though, good, life, much, son, shire, english, man, mil, queen, time, church, afterwards, ioh, london, edward, place, dyed, died, idem, yet, thomas, since, men

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The history of the worthies of England who for parts and learning have been eminent in the several counties : together with an historical narrative of the native commodities and rarities in each county / endeavoured by Thomas Fuller., Anglorum speculum, or The worthies of England, in church and state Alphabetically digested into the several shires and counties therein contained; wherein are illustrated the lives and characters of the most eminent persons since the conquest to this present age. Also an account of the commodities and trade of each respective county, and the most flourishing cities and towns therein., and Anglorum speculum, or, The worthies of England in church and state alphabetically digested into the several shires and counties therein contained : wherein are illustrated the lives and characters of the most eminent persons since the conquest to this present age : also an account of the commodities and trade of each respective county and the most flourishing cities and towns therein..

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

ut prius, king henry, anno idem, king edward, queen elizabeth, king james, queen mary, anno dom, anno will, sir thomas, sir john, king charles, de eadem, chief justice, anno domini, sir william, sir jo, made bishop, ancient family, king richard, anno rob, memorable persons, lord chief, de la, lyeth buried, died anno, de script, years together, anno johan, sir robert, anno tho, bale de, sir henry, commonly called, civil wars, sir edward, many years, sir th, sir richard, set forth, anno anno, lord mayor, eldest son, anno rich, lord treasurer, preferred bishop, made lord, sir francis, queen eliz, years since

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are A declaration of the Lords and Commons assembled in Parliament. Die Lunæ 8. Septemb. 1645. Whereas the Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled, are informed that by the subtile and malicious practises of a Popish and malignant party, ... British antiquities revived, or, A friendly contest touching the soveraignty of the three princes of VVales in ancient times managed with certain arguments whereunto answers are applyed by Robert Vaughan, Esq. ; to which is added the pedigree of the Right Honourable the Earl of Carbery, Lord President of Wales ; with a short account of the five royall tribes of Cambria, by the same author., and Anglorum speculum, or, The worthies of England in church and state alphabetically digested into the several shires and counties therein contained : wherein are illustrated the lives and characters of the most eminent persons since the conquest to this present age : also an account of the commodities and trade of each respective county and the most flourishing cities and towns therein..

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, prince, king, sea, parliament, master, lord, land, henry, england, edward, county, castle, york, west, wales, university, town, thomas, st., south, son, sir, school, richard, reign, reformation, queen, pope, persons, oxford, north, man, london, life, learning, law, knight, justice, john, ireland, house, honour, hall, father, family, estate, english, east, earl

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 anno, and Charles by the grace of God king of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, defender of the faith, &c. to our right trusty and welbeloued cousin, William Earle of Northampton ... 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?":

years, life, time, tho, man, place, mil, death, men, name, year, others, day, m., kings, age, page, part, person, people, son, arg, ▪, self, hath, will, viz, persons, pounds, none, author, books, way, arm, order, house, miles, body, times, parts, nothing, memory, daughter, side, estate, work, l., history, anno, cause

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, be, being, had, have, were, born, made, are, bred, said, died, dyed, been, did, called, buried, having, wrote, became, say, make, found, gave, do, built, left, flourished, seeing, lived, see, take, let, am, sent, set, betwixt, created, brought, came, find, taken, put, preferred, know, according, descended, returned, went

Proper Nouns

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

anno, king, de, prius, county, sir, 〉, ◊, ar, bishop, 〈, lord, england, henry, john, st., london, queen, edward, d., shire, idem, english, thomas, church, ●, oxford, william, earl, will, son, jo, rob, richard, colledge, knight, s., ioh, hen, cambridge, elizabeth, robert, arch, prince, master, ut, mr., wales, james, c.

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?"

his, he, it, their, him, i, they, them, our, her, my, we, himself, you, she, me, themselves, your, us, its, one, thy, thee, mine, ours, whereof, ut, theirs, hic, herself, yours, †, kn, itself, thou, vnto, ob, na, mself, hitherto, himfelf, dy''d, à, vvith, vp, tollavit, thriveth, there, s, pelf

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?"

great, many, such, first, good, own, other, same, more, last, much, fair, best, rich, second, true, ancient, ioh, little, most, poor, old, former, excellent, better, several, worthy, high, long, third, large, eminent, new, full, small, late, few, able, next, present, fourth, general, pious, sable, famous, english, common, whole, married, proper

not, so, then, thereof, afterwards, therein, most, more, first, as, now, very, well, here, much, also, up, never, only, there, rather, indeed, out, over, thus, together, yet, long, ever, therefore, too, formerly, generally, far, still, down, onely, no, lately, again, in, away, off, probably, soon, however, especially, forth, commonly, about

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.