Distant Spectators: Distant Reading for periodicals of the Enlightenment

Presentation at the virtual dha go!es digital Day presenting the current state of the project "Distant Spectators: Distant Reading for periodicals of the Enlightenment" funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ go!digital next generation funding scheme.

The main objective of Distant Spectators is how (and which) quantitative methods (topic modeling, stylometry, sentiment analysis and network analysis) prove useful and efficient for the analysis of a multilingual text corpus from the 18th century, which currently incorporates discourses in six languages (French, Italian, Spanish, English, German, and Portuguese) with a total of approximately 4000 individual texts with more than 9 million tokens. In particular, the quantitative analysis of the Spectators aims to enhance and improve the studies on the transnational transfer and development of this literary genre based on the English prototypes The Tatler (1709–1711), The Spectator (1711–1712 and 1714) and The Guardian (1713) founded by Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele, while keeping geographical, cultural and temporal specifics under constant consideration. 

DiSpecs builds on existing data drawn from the digitized, TEI encoded and semantically enriched texts of The Spectators in the International Context (Ertler et al. 2011–2020), an ongoing digital edition project which has been running since 2008, and applies quantitative methods of data analysis in order to open up new perspectives on the material.