This master’s thesis is dedicated to the thematic analysis of US-American slave narratives using the ‘distant reading’ technique of topic modelling. Slave narratives are mostly autobiographic accounts of formerly enslaved persons who detail their life in bondage. As deeply political texts, slave narratives significantly contributed to the abolitionist movement in the United States that gained momentum from the 1830s onwards and resulted in the official abolition of slavery in 1865.
Applying topic modelling, a statistical method used to determine collocating words in text corpora, this thesis traces how themes in slave narratives evolved over time. The analysis is based on two corpora: Documenting the American South, a comprehensive anthology of almost 300 US-American slave narratives from 1734 to 1929, and the Federal Writers’ Project, a collection of roughly 2,300 interviews with formerly enslaved persons conducted from 1936 to 1938 across seventeen US-American states. In addition to the thematic analysis of slave narratives, the genre of slave narratives and the intersection of slavery studies and the digital humanities will also be thoroughly discussed.