Reconstructing Readers’ Tastes through Topic Modeling of Private Poetry Anthologies

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many lay readers commonly transcribed poems that were meaningful to them by hand into notebooks. I call these cultural artifacts ‘private poetry anthologies’. The heterogeneity of the anthologized texts in these notebooks makes it diYcult to understand what uses or aesthetic preferences they responded to. I argue that topic modeling can be a useful digital tool for identifying thematic patterns speci@c to these materials. This article presents the results of analyzing eight such notebooks in Spanish language, using a control corpus of 54 poetic works from the same period for comparison. The results reveal that the private anthologies tend to emphasize sentimental themes, and that overall they are not outliers but rather tend to be close to the thematic mean of the poetry of their time.