Topic Modeling for the Identification of Gender-specific Discourse. Virtues and Vices in French and Spanish 18th Century Periodicals

Gender-specific knowledge – just like knowledge in general – is generated through discourses that are disseminated through (mass) media. Among the first mass media is the Spectator press (Moralische Wochenschriften) which spread all over Europe throughout the 18th century. With their gender-specific discourses, analyzed in Spectatoriale Geschlechterkonstruktionen (Völkl 2022), they decisively promote the development of a (bourgeois) gender model, shaping the social perception of gender until today. Against this background, the present article examines the gender-specific discourses in the French and Spanish Spectator periodicals by means of topic modeling which detects semantically related words. The study, which originates from the project Distant Spectators. Distant Reading for Periodicals of the Enlightenment (Scholger et al. 2019–2021), shows that topic modeling reinforces previous findings on gender-specific discourses in the Spectator periodicals. Moreover, it offers new perspectives concerning this research corpus.