Topic modelling is a method of statistical data mining of a corpus of documents, popular in the digital humanities and, increasingly, in social sciences. A critical methodological issue is how ‘topics’ (groups of co-selected word types) can be interpreted in analytically meaningful terms. In the current literature, this is typically done by ‘eyeballing’; that is, cursory and largely unsystematic examination of the ‘top’ words in each algorithmically identified word group. We critically evaluate this approach in a dual analysis, comparing the ‘eyeballing’ approach with an alternative using sample close reading across the corpus. We used MALLET to extract two topic models from a test corpus: one with stopwords included, another with stopwords excluded. We then used the aforementioned methods to assign labels to these topics. The results suggest that a close-reading approach is more effective not only in level of detail but even in terms of accuracy. In particular, we found that: assigning labels via eyeballing yields incomplete or incorrect topic labels; removing stopwords drastically affects the analysis outcome; topic labelling and interpretation depend considerably on the analysts’ specialist knowledge; and differences of perspective or construal are unlikely to be captured through a topic model. We conclude that an interpretive paradigm founded in close reading may make topic modelling more appealing to humanities researchers.

This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/pages/standard-publication-reuse-rights)