Gender-specific knowledge – just like knowledge in general – is generated
through discourses that are disseminated through (mass) media. Among
the first mass media is the Spectator press (Moralische Wochenschriften) which
spread all over Europe throughout the 18th century. With their gender-specific
discourses, analyzed in Spectatoriale Geschlechterkonstruktionen (Völkl 2022),
they decisively promote the development of a (bourgeois) gender model, shaping
the social perception of gender until today. Against this background, the present
article examines the gender-specific discourses in the French and Spanish Spectator
periodicals by means of topic modeling which detects semantically related
words. The study, which originates from the project Distant Spectators. Distant
Reading for Periodicals of the Enlightenment (Scholger et al. 2019–2021), shows
that topic modeling reinforces previous findings on gender-specific discourses
in the Spectator periodicals. Moreover, it offers new perspectives concerning
this research corpus
