Publikationen

(extended abstract)

(extended 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.

with contributions from Denis Helic and Jacqueline More

This synthetically generated dataset can be used to evaluate outlier detection algorithms. It has 10 attributes and 1000 observations, of which 100 are labeled as outliers. Two-dimensional combinations of attributes form differently shaped clusters. Attribute 0 & Attribute 1: Two circular clusters Attribute 2 & Attribute 3: Two banana shaped clusters Attribute 4 & Attribute 5: Three point clouds Attribute 6 & Attribute 7: Two point clouds with variances Attribute 8 & Attribute 9: Three anisotropic shaped clusters. The "outlier" column states whether an observation is an outlier or not. Additionally, the .zip file contains 10 stratified randomized train test splits (70% train, 30% test).