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  1. Home > Articles & Issues >
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  3. Digital Reconstructi ...
Article

Digital Reconstruction of a Feminist Literary Past: Topic Modelling Elisa Mújica's Newspaper Criticism (1972–1974)

Silvia Andrea Hernández Crispín ORCID (1)
(1) Texas Tech University
Download article
Open on Zenodo
Submitted on
December 30, 2025
Accepted on
August 20, 2026
Published on
September 17, 2026
Last modified on
September 22, 2026
Volume 2
The Past
Research paper
DOI
10.46298/transformations.17210
License
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Indicators
60
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21
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Digital Reconstruction of a Feminist Literary Past: Topic Modelling Elisa Mújica's Newspaper Criticism (1972–1974)

Silvia Andrea Hernández Crispín ORCID (1)
(1) Texas Tech University
Abstract
English
Elisa Mújica (1918–2003) is increasingly recognised as one of the most important Colombian women writers of the twentieth century. Yet her work as a critic in the Lecturas Dominicales supplement in the newspaper El Tiempo – a central venue in the Colombian literary field – remains under-studied. This article presents a mixed-methods analysis of Mújica's columns from 1972 to 1974, combining topic modelling with close reading under the framework of data feminism. Using latent Dirichlet allocation implemented in R on a corpus of 572 document segments derived from digitised columns, I model six topics. Rather than treating these topics as purely formal clusters, I read them as traces of gendered practices in a literary field still dominated by male authors and authorities. Guided by data feminism (D'Ignazio and Klein 2020), I argue that topic modelling can help make visible the asymmetrical distribution of gendered authority in the archive, while close reading reveals how Mújica simultaneously participates in and questions masculinised canons. The article demonstrates how computational methods and feminist theory can jointly illuminate the politics of literary value in twentieth-century Latin America.Published version, formatted by the journal. Published in Transformations: A DARIAH Journal, Issue 02 ("The Past"), 15 September 2026, https://doi.org/10.46298/transformations.17210. Corpus metadata and R code: 10.5281/zenodo.20550727.
Spanish
Elisa Mújica (1918–2003) es reconocida como una de las escritoras colombianas más importantes del siglo XX. Sin embargo, su labor como crítica literaria en el suplemento Lecturas Dominicales de El Tiempo – uno de los espacios de mayor visibilidad en el campo literario colombiano – permanece insuficientemente estudiada. Este artículo presenta un análisis de métodos mixtos de las columnas de Mújica publicadas entre 1972 y 1974, combinando modelado de tópicos con lectura cercana dentro del marco teórico del feminismo de datos. Utilizando asignación latente de Dirichlet implementada en R sobre un corpus de 572 segmentos documentales, se identifican seis tópicos temáticos. Guiada por el feminismo de datos (D'Ignazio y Klein 2020), argumento que el modelado de tópicos puede hacer visible la distribución asimétrica de la autoridad generizada en el archivo, mientras que la lectura cercana revela cómo Mújica simultáneamente participa en y cuestiona los cánones masculinizados. El artículo demuestra cómo los métodos computacionales y la teoría feminista pueden iluminar conjuntamente las políticas del valor literario en América Latina en el siglo XX.
Keywords
  • Mújica
  • Elisa Mújica
  • data feminism
  • topic modelling
  • feminismo de datos
  • modelado de tópicos
  • crítica literaria colombiana
  • periodismo literario
  • humanidades digitales
  • literary journalism
  • digital humanities
  • Colombian literary criticism
Linked publications - datasets - software
  • Is supplemented by

    Hernandez Crispin, S. A. (2026). Dataset and R Code: Topic Modeling Elisa Mújica’s Newspaper Criticism in Lecturas Dominicales (1972–1974) [Dataset]. Zenodo. 10.5281/ZENODO.20550727

  • Is supplement to
    https://zenodo.org/records/20550727
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