Thematic Landscapes of the Past: Analysing Slovene Historical Periodicals With Topic Modeling
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Creating Interoperable Corpora of Historical Newspapers
Abstract
This paper explores the thematic landscapes of three Slovene historical periodicals—Slovenka, Slovenec, and Slovenski narod—from the sPeriodika corpus, a comprehensive collection of Slovene press published between 1771 and 1914. Using BERTopic, we analyse the thematic profiles of these periodicals, enriched with diachronic perspectives. Our study examines the thematic commonalities and specificities of the selected periodicals, highlighting their distinct political orientations, target audiences, and the increasing nationalist polarisation in public discourse. This work contributes to digital humanities by demonstrating the potential of modern topic modelling techniques, such as BERTopic, to advance historical and cultural research.