Below is a semi-automatied analysis of a Distant Reader study carrel ("dataset"). The carrel includes the 48 chapters ("books") from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, translated into English and in prose form. For more detail about the carrel see the rudumentary bibliography or the computed summary page. It might be interesting to compare & contrast the generative-AI summary (below) with a similar analysis I made by hand a few months ago. For more detail about study carrels in general, see the README file. --Eric Lease Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>, Librarian Emeritus, University of Notre Dame (June 19, 2026)
The homer carrel is a study collection devoted to the works of Homer. According to the
size functions, the carrel contains 48 items totaling 272,735 words
with an overall Flesch readability score of 76, suggesting a fairly accessible
reading level (somewhat surprising for classical epic, which likely reflects the plainness of the
prose translations used). The carrel is split evenly into two halves: 24 books of the Iliad
(homer-iliad_01 through homer-iliad_24) and 24 books of the Odyssey
(homer-odyssey_01 through homer-odyssey_24). The items are filed as plain
text (.txt files) and the author and date fields are blank across all records, which is
typical for anonymous classical corpora.
The top keywords (from getKeywords) reveal a carrel that hovers almost entirely around
war, household, and divine politics. The dominant entries are:
Other telling keywords include “sea,” “fight,” “gods,” “home,” “horses,” “armour,” “spear,” “penelope,” “eumaeus,” “circe,” “calypso,” “scylla,” and “priam.” Together these keywords gesture at the two narrative poles of the carrel: military conflict (Iliad) and the homeward/voyaging journey (Odyssey).
The unigram list confirms a heroic register. The top terms are “man” (741), “ulysses” (691), “men” (661), “jove” (618), “go” (548), “us” (545), “achaeans” (510), “trojans” (510), “house” (475), “hector” (452), “ships” (439), “achilles” (415), “father” (411), “gods” (395), and “spear” (389). Function words like “among,” “though,” “round,” “till,” “set,” “therefore,” “still,” and “many” fill out a long tail that includes terms of violence (“kill,” “killed,” “struck,” “wounded”) and affect (“weeping,” “tears,” “sorrow,” “anger”).
Bigrams paint a vivid thematic picture: “father jove” (67), “king agamemnon” (45), “phoebus apollo” (33), “never yet” (29), “aegisbearing jove” (28), “ulysses answered” (26), “fell heavily” (26), “rosyfingered dawn” (22), “blessed gods” (21), “pallas minerva” (21), “answered telemachus” (20), “loud cry” (19), “father house” (17), “brave man” (15), “brave hector” (7), “wicked suitors” (7), “single combat” (7), “wild boar” (11). The repeated pairing of speakers (“X answered”) and epithets (“aegisbearing,” “rosyfingered,” “bronzeshod,” “silver-footed”) is characteristic of Homeric style, and the phrase “wicked suitors” appears specifically in the Odyssey books.
The noun list mirrors the same preoccupations: “son” (1259), “man” (766), “ulysses” (728), “men” (696), “trojans” (561), “house” (534), “ships” (520), “hector” (488), “achilles” (430), “gods” (422), “spear” (420), “achaeans” (367), “father” (366), “hand/hands,” “way,” “horses,” “sea,” “ship,” “city,” “ground,” “armour,” “suitors,” “heart,” “battle,” “day,” “body,” “head,” “time,” “mother,” “king,” “chariot,” “death,” “fight,” “daughter,” “eyes,” “shield,” “fire,” “agamemnon,” “wine,” “water,” “wife,” “place,” “land,” “night,” “women,” “wall,” “blood,” “bronze,” “earth,” “river,” “wind,” “bow,” “mind,” “gold,” “home,” “life,” “friends,” “troy,” “town,” “sheep,” “bed,” “sword,” “child,” “sun,” “husband,” “stranger.”
The verb list captures the action of the epics: “go” (1484), “say” (1308), “come” (1142), “take” (1029), “have” (867), “do” (811), “make” (801), “see” (766), “give” (687), “let” (545), “tell” (515), “get” (463), “speak” (456), “fall” (452), “bring” (400), “leave” (399), “kill” (381), “fight” (375), “stand” (321), “answer” (314), “lie” (310), “hold” (286), “find” (275), “draw” (245), “drive” (242), “strike” (200), “fly” (196), “reach” (191), “pray” (152), “cry” (144), “spring” (143), “throw” (162), “wound” (79), “slay” (77), “sail” (66), “weep” (108), “escape” (71), “hurl,” “drag,” “marry,” “bury.” Not surprisingly, “go,” “say,” “come,” and “take” dominate a narrative of long journeys and frequent dialogue.
The adjectives skew to moral and physical estimation: “own” (542), “great” (495), “other” (443), “good” (423), “old” (281), “brave” (192), “strong” (182), “noble” (168), “dead” (164), “fair” (150), “young” (149), “mighty” (130), “dear” (119), “whole” (118), “angry” (114), “rich” (80), “golden” (74), “poor” (73), “valiant” (56), “fierce” (54), “goodly” (54), “dark” (54), “cruel” (42), “cunning” (32), “wicked” (33), “wise” (32), “famous” (20), “skilled” (19), “godlike” (7), “swift” (10), “proud” (30), “furious” (37), “sacred” (9). The list is essentially a vocabulary of Homeric epithet: “goodly,” “mighty,” “brave,” “fierce,” “dear,” “cunning,” “swift.”
Pronoun frequencies paint a picture of a heavily character-driven text. “he” (7680), “i” (4819), “they” (3885), “his” (3828), “you” (3720), “it” (2269), “my” (1534), “we” (1507), “she” (1482), “their” (1350), “who” (1281), “your” (1238), “that” (1066), “her” (662), “which” (658), “all” (633), “this” (540), “there” (521), “our” (444). The dominance of “he/his” alongside “i/my” fits a text dense with male heroes in dialogue; “she/her” is comparatively minor but still substantial, owing to Penelope, Helen, Thetis, Athena/Minerva, and the women servants.
The named-entity list of people is a roll call of the Iliad and Odyssey. Highest counts go to “jove” (434) — by far the most-mentioned figure, a reflection of the gods' constant intervention — followed by “telemachus” (183), “menelaus” (177), “minerva” (154), “juno” (115), “aeneas” (68), “helen” (59), “peleus” (53), “idomeneus” (47), “eumaeus” (44), “aegisbearing jove” (30), “priam” (17), “penelope” (17), “alexandrus” (=Paris, 16), “iris” (20), “antenor” (19), “teucer” (18), “teiresias” (12), “scylla” (12), “menoetius” (12), “lycaon” (12), “oileus” (11), “meriones” (11), “laodamas,” “vulcan,” “proserpine,” “phoebus apollo,” “idaeus,” “boreas,” “antilochus,” and “socus.”
Place-names are dominated by the Argives (142) and Ithaca (65), which makes sense given the dual focus on the Greek army before Troy and Odysseus's homecoming. Other prominent locations include “laertes” (39) as a place-name (his estate), “diana” (27), “priam” (26), “peleus” (23), “paris” (23), “neleus” (20), “autolycus” (16), “laomedon” (12), “egypt” (11), “sthenelus” (9), “hellespont” (9), “pylos” (8), “thebes” (6), “mycene” (6), “ida” (6), “athens” (6), “samos” (5), “hellas” (5), “scheria” (2), “phoenicia” (3), “libya” (3), “sidon” (3), and “pleuron” (3). The geographic imagination reaches from the Troad (Ida, the Hellespont) to Ithaca, Pylos, Sparta (Lacedaemon appears elsewhere), Egypt, Phoenicia, and the legendary Scheria of the Phaeacians.
This list is more of an interesting artifact of the entity tagger than a literal set of organizations; the named entities captured as organizations include “apollo” (148), “minerva” (55), “antilochus” (51), “alcinous” (45), “sarpedon” (44), “achaeans” (36), “deiphobus” (22), “aeacus” (21), “melanthius” (20), “pisistratus” (19), “polydamas” (18), “asius” (17), “achaean” (15), “teucer” (13), “philoetius” (13), “aegisthus” (12), “dolius” (11), “aeneas” (11), “talthybius” (10), “polybus” (10), “pisander” (10), “glaucus” (10), “phoebus” (9), “idaeus” (9), “euphorbus” (9), “hecuba” (8), “chromius” (8), “andromache” (8), “agelaus” (8), “peneleos” (6), “clytius” (6), “aeolus” (6), “triptolemus,” “neptune” (5), “alcmena” (4), “admetus” (4), “adamas” (4) and many others. The high rank of “Apollo” (148) reflects his ceaseless interventions, and the inclusion of household figures like Melanthius, Dolius, and Philoetius points to the Odyssey's attention to servants.
A word-search for “home” returns many of the Odyssey's signature lines. For example:
“Nevertheless, I want to get home, and can think of nothing else.”
[homer-odyssey_05, idx62]
“now that you have reached my house I doubt not you will get home without further misadventure no matter how much you have suffered in the past.”
[homer-odyssey_13, idx3]
“Our wives and little ones at home look anxiously for our coming, but the work that we came hither to do has not been done.”
[homer-iliad_02, idx47]
The Iliad sentences with “home” cluster around themes of household, hearth, and the domestic stakes of war (e.g., Hector's farewell to Andromache in Iliad 6, Priam's recovery of Hector's body in Iliad 24).
A search for “wrath” returns key lines from the embassy to Achilles in Iliad 9 — for example:
“Now, therefore, I say battle with your pride and beat it; cherish not your anger for ever…”
[homer-iliad_09, idx162]
This illustrates the central role of mēnis (wrath) in the Iliad's opening movements.
The semantically similar words tool returned some interesting near-equivalents: for the seed “hero,” the closest neighbors are captain (0.999), idaeus (0.999), valour (0.999), famous (0.999), dread (0.999), glaucus (0.999), and hercules (0.999) — names and concepts clustering around martial valor. For “war,” the nearest are victory (0.999), slay (0.999), strength (0.999), destruction (0.999), defend (0.999), killing (0.999), and sake (0.999) — the conceptual constellation around combat.
The bibliography entries give a clean arc:
The Odyssey books mirror this: a divine council in Book 1 dispatches Athena to Telemachus; 2–4 follow Telemachus's journey to Pylos and Sparta; 5–8 follow Odysseus's release from Calypso, shipwreck, and reception among the Phaeacians; 9–12 are the great Apology, with the Cyclops, Aeolus, the Laestrygonians, Circe, the Underworld, and the Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis; 13 returns Odysseus to Ithaca; 14–20 depict his disguise as a beggar, the recognition by Eumaeus and Telemachus, and Penelope's bow contest; 21–24 narrate the slaying of the suitors, reunion with Penelope, and restoration of order with Laertes and the Ithacans.
Taken together, the homer carrel is a balanced, complete presentation of Homer's two epics in 24-book divisions each, totaling about 273,000 words. Linguistically, the text bears the marks of archaic oral-style English translation: heavy use of epithets (“rosyfingered dawn,” “aegisbearing Jove,” “silver-footed Thetis”), frequent speeches introduced by formulaic phrases (“X answered”), and anaphoric repetition of names. Thematically, the carrel is a study in two complementary visions — the Iliad's world of wrath, battle, and the death of heroes, and the Odyssey's world of journeying, disguise, household fidelity, and homecoming — bound together by an omnipresent divine machinery (Jove is the single most-mentioned entity, by a wide margin) and a consistently elevated moral vocabulary of brave, noble, mighty, cunning, wicked, and fierce.