Faces, Fights, and Families: Topic Modeling and Gendered Themes in Two Corpora of Swedish Prose Fiction

This paper explores topic modeling (TM) as a tool for “distant reading” of two Swedish literary corpora. We investigate what kinds of insight and knowledge a TM-based approach can provide to Swedish literary history, and which methodological difficulties are associated with this endeavour. The TM is based on 12- and 24-term chunks of selected verb and common noun lemmas. We generate models with 20, 40, and 100 topics. We also propose a method for a quantitative and qualitative gendered thematic analysis by combining TM with a study of how the topics relate to gender in characters and authors. The two corpora contain, respectively, Swedish classics (1821–1941) and recent bestsellers (2004–2017). We find that most of the topics proposed by the TM are easy to interpret as conceptual themes, and that the “same” themes appear for the two corpora and for different TM settings. The study allows us to make interesting observations concerning different aspects of gender and topic distribution.