Digital Dickens: An automated content analysis of Charles Dickens’ novels

This investigation employs computational linguistic methods such as document classification, topic modelling, and distributional semantics to scrutinize eight novels by Charles Dickens, uncovering dimensions of social criticism, literary realism, and narrative structures. While affirming positive results for automated analysis of social criticism, the study emphasizes that it could discover differing associations only due to semantic abstraction, which distributional semantics, word embeddings, and topic modelling can offer. Literary realism is successfully traced through detailed descriptions and everyday activities. Plotting plots with computational linguistic methods, specifically conceptual maps with textplot, shows promise but requires refinement. The study shows that current methods in content analysis offer new possibilities for literary analysis and digital humanities.