Editors’ Choice: Topic Modeling Ghosts, Haunted Houses, and Heroines in 19th-Century Literature

The content of this post was delivered at The Humanities Commons and Data Science Initiative at UC Irvine. 
My work turns towards topic modeling with MALLET and comparing corpora with Voyant to study several queries concerning over 600 literary annuals (each with 30-40 literary works and 10-20 engravings). The project begins with a small sampling by comparing 90 Gothic short stories published in literary annuals 1823-1831 (from Gothic Short Stories in British Literary Annuals [2012]) to those short stories published in other venues using corpora recently created with Ted Underwood and Franco Moretti’s distance reading and topic modeling projects (corpora that are now freely available as transcripts). With a corpora of more than 90 short stories 1823-1831 published prior to the publication of the second edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, if I can answer some of the below questions, then I will be able to articulate (definitively) if the literary annual genre actually changed the gothic short story and hence altered the most popular literary genre on many continents in the nineteenth century.

Read full post here.

This content was selected for Digital Humanities Now by Editor-in-Chief Ben Schneider based on nominations by Editors-at-Large: Harika Kottakota, Heriberto Sierra, Marisha Caswell, Vanessa Raymond, and Laura Vianello