An Artificial Intelligence Application of Theme and Space in Life Writings of Middle Eastern Women

Abstract

Recently, the revolutionary transformations in social and political landscapes as well as the remarkable developments in artificial intelligence reinforced the importance of geography and spatial analyses in literary and cultural studies. This chapter proposes an analytical framework of topic modelling and sentiment analysis for exploring the connection between theme, place, and sentiment in 36 autobiographical narratives by or about women from the Middle East. In the proposed framework, a latent Dirichlet allocation and latent semantic analysis algorithm from topic modelling, TextBlob library for sentiment analysis are employed to detect the place names that come together and to point out the associated themes and emotions throughout the data source. The model gives a scoring of each topical clusters and reveals that the diasporic authors are more likely to write about their hometown than their current host land. The authors hope that the merging of topic modelling and sentiment analysis would be beneficial to literary critics in the analysis of long texts.