Abstract
Spectator periodicals contributed to spreading the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, a turning point in human history and the foundation of our modern societies. In this work, we study the spirit and atmosphere captured in the spectator periodicals about important social issues from the 18th century by analyzing text sentiment of those periodicals. Specifically, based on a manually annotated corpus of over 3 700 issues published in five different languages and over a period of more than one hundred years, we conduct a three-fold sentiment analysis: First, we analyze the development of sentiment over time as well as the influence of topics and narrative forms on sentiment. Second, we construct sentiment networks to assess the polarity of perceptions between different entities, including periodicals, places and people. Third, we construct and analyze sentiment word networks to determine topological differences between words with positive and negative polarity allowing us to make conclusions on how sentiment was expressed in spectator periodicals.Our results depict a mildly positive tone in spectator periodicals underlining the positive attitude towards important topics of the Age of Enlightenment, but also signaling stylistic devices to disguise critique in order to avoid censorship. We also observe strong regional variation in sentiment, indicating cultural and historic differences between countries. For example, while Italy perceived other European countries as positive role models, French periodicals were frequently more critical towards other European countries. Finally, our topological analysis depicts a weak overrepresentation of positive sentiment words corroborating our findings about a general mildly positive tone in spectator periodicals.We believe that our work based on the combination of the sentiment analysis of spectator periodicals and the extensive knowledge available from literary studies sheds interesting new light on these publications. Furthermore, we demonstrate the inclusion of sentiment analysis as another useful method in the digital humanist’s distant reading toolbox.
Highlights
During the Age of Enlightenment, so-called spectator periodicals were a popular way of distributing information to a non-academic audience and providing a platform for debating a plethora of topics, such as politics, religion and literature
We observe low transitivity and a tendency towards low degrees for negative words as well as higher transitivity and a tendency for mid-range degrees for positive words. Combining these observations with the results from our centrality analysis, which depict a weak overrepresentation of positive words among top central words, we find that spectator periodicals had, in general, a mild to positive attitude towards topics of the Age of Enlightenment and used the majority of negative words distinctively to discuss critical issues
We find a commonality in the top central words, for which we observe a weak overrepresentation of positive words in both sentiment word networks and simple co-occurrence networks which, combined with our results from degree distributions, suggest a general mild to positive tone in spectator periodicals
Summary
During the Age of Enlightenment (starting in the 18th century), so-called spectator periodicals were a popular way of distributing information to a non-academic audience and providing a platform for debating a plethora of topics, such as politics, religion and literature. The mean sentiment varies over languages with French and Italian periodicals being mostly positive, whereas German, Portuguese and Spanish periodicals have mostly negative sentiment the peak for 1753 might not be representative. In case of French, Italian and Portuguese periodicals, the majority of narrative forms convey a more positive sentiment as compared to the language mean, while the majority of narrative forms in Spanish periodicals expressed a more negative sentiment. Instead it was used to annotate fanciful narrations Such narrative forms are frequent in Spanish periodicals, including El Duende de Madrid comprising a complete fanciful narration in which authors of published discourses were represented as goblins in a darker setting, potentially explaining the negative mean standardized sentiment for Utopia in Spanish periodicals. One plausible hypothesis for this observation could be that authors of spectator periodicals aimed at being impartial, which is possibly reflected in their explanations depicting both positive as well as negative aspects of the subject
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