How We Narrate the Self: A Large-Scale Analysis of Autobiographical Texts

This project examines autobiographical texts written in English from 1700 to 1900 to analyze how we tend to narrate the self and how our self-narrations have changed over time. In our current era of social media and proliferating modes of digital self-representation, explorations of how we narrate and represent the self have become even more poignant. With its increase in printed texts and new possibilities for widespread literary celebrity, the time of this project witnessed a moment similar to our own, in which authors could increasingly disseminate textual representations of themselves to a widespread, unknown, consuming public. By employing topic modeling and other text analysis techniques, this project aims to uncover larger-scale themes and trends concerning how authors during this time tended to narrate their lives for public consumption.