@article{jcls 108, author = {Yvonne Völkl, Sanja Sarić, Martina Scholger}, title = {Topic Modeling for the Identification of Gender-specific Discourse. Virtues and Vices in French and Spanish 18th Century Periodicals}, volume = {1}, year = {2022}, url = {https://jcls.io/article/id/108/}, issue = {1}, doi = {10.48694/jcls.108}, abstract = {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 (<i>Moralische Wochenschriften</i>) which spread all over Europe throughout the 18<sup>th</sup> century. With their gender-specific discourses, analyzed in <i>Spectatoriale Geschlechterkonstruktionen </i>(Voelkl 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 <i>Distant Spectators. Distant Reading for Periodicals of the Enlightenment</i> (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.}, month = {11}, keywords = {topic modeling,French,Spanish,Spectator press,18th century,Literary Gender Studies}, issn = {2940-1348}, publisher={Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt}, journal = {Journal of Computational Literary Studies} }