Picturebooks
Significant Themes in 19th-Century Literature
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Jockers, Matthew and David Mimno, “Significant Themes in 19th-Century Literature” Poetics 41(6):750–769, 2013
Referrer: Scott Dexter
Categories: digital humanities, distant reading, data mining, computer science, methodology
Annotation:
Matthew Jockers and David Mimno discuss their distant reading project regarding the themes of 19th century literature. To do so, the two researchers mine and model topics from over 3,300 works of literature. The literature encompasses British, American, and Irish texts. Taking a variety of other factors into consideration the two seek to find trends in the themes of novels from that century. The methodology used incorporates counting words, tokenization as well as topic modeling. The tool Mallet is used by the researchers as the main engine for mining the text. Jockers and Mimno discuss the preprocessing elements (stopword removal, Bag of Words segmenting of the text, part of speech tagging of nouns, and modeling of the topics). Finally, the analysis and observations are given. Topic modeling is shown to be a scalable solution for those interested in reading massive selections of hundreds and thousands of books.
