# Exploring Nineteenth-Century Spanish Chapbooks through Topics and Places

Marina Berazategui, Simon Gabay, Pauline Jacsont, Elina Leblanc, Fassaleh Taal

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## To cite this version:

Marina Berazategui, Simon Gabay, Pauline Jacsont, Elina Leblanc, Fassaleh Taal. Exploring Nineteenth-Century Spanish Chapbooks through Topics and Places. Artl@s Bulletin, 2026, 14 (1), pp.139-145. hal-05454714

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# Exploring Nineteenth-Century Spanish Chapbooks through Topics and Places

Marina Berazategui

Musée d'ethnographie de Genève

Simon Gabay

Université de Genève

Pauline Jacsont

Université de Genève

Elina Leblanc

Université de Genève

Fassaleh Taal

Université de Neuchâtel

## Desenrollando el Cordel and the Hackathon: New Perspectives on Pliegos Corpus Analysis

The *Desenrollando el cordel* project (2020–2024), led by Professor Constance Carta, valorizes a collection of 912 Spanish chapbooks (*pliegos de cordel*) held at the University Library of Geneva. These 19th-century chapbooks, often adorned with woodcuts, reflect the diversity of popular literature of that time. The project mainly consists of the creation of an “enriched” digital library:<fnref n="10" /> in addition to the transcription, carried out automatically but entirely controlled, a catalogue of the woodcuts contained

in the works, the identification and disambiguation of place names, etc., are provided to open new research perspectives.

During the University of Geneva hackathon, XML-TEI transcriptions<fnref n="11" /> were provided, alongside a CSV of place names linked to Wikidata, and another separate CSV containing a classification of woodcuts in our collection.<fnref n="12" /> Through discussions about these data, these chapbooks emerged as valuable sources for understanding Spanish 19th-century collective imaginaries, particularly regarding how non-European colonies were presented to a popular audience during Spain’s colonial decline.

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Files from the Moreno collection https://github.com/DesenrollandoElCordel/Moreno-TEI-files and files from the Varios collection https://github.com/DesenrollandoElCordel/Varios-TEI-files.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ The digital library: https://desenrollandoelcordel.unige.ch.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² The details of this classification are available here: https://desenrollandoelcordel.unige.ch/exist/apps/projetcordel/Documentation/criterios_edicion.xml?view=body&odd=projet_cordel.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 1.** The hackathon team, *Les moutons de l'extrême*, at work (Why this name? Simply because we love sheep, their curls, and because we work tirelessly, pushing ourselves to the extreme — and, also, because we have a shepherd on our team!) - Photo: Alexandra Fabry-Tochilina.</figcaption></figure>

## Technical Approach and Main Results

To “distantly” read our corpus<fnref n="13" />, we rely on two techniques: topic modelling and co-occurrence networks, two mining methods to identify and explore themes in corpora. To carry out such a study, we rely on the texts in verse only, because there are much more texts in verse than in prose (854 vs 31), even though those in verse are shorter (between 4 and 8 pages long) than those in prose (between 32 and 48 pages long). To avoid over-representing information in prose texts, we have chosen to focus exclusively on verse texts. Before these analyses,

the corpus was cleaned by removing page numbers, dates, colophons, and running titles to reduce textual noise and improve model convergence. It was then lemmatized using the Universal Dependencies (UD) Spanish “GSD” model<fnref n="14" /> distributed with the UD 2.5 Models for UDPipe<fnref n="15" /> to reduce all word forms to their lemma (*apples->apple*), and thus speed up the computation (the final lexicon is smaller) and maximize the quality of the results (two words are associated, despite linguistic flexion).

<footnote n="13">¹³ Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. Londres, Verso, 2013.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Ballesteros, Miguel, Héctor Martínez Alonso, Ryan McDonald, Elena Pascual, Natalia Silveira, Daniel Zeman, and Joakim Nivre. "UD Spanish GSD," 2019. https://universaldependencies.org/treebanks/es_gsd/index.html.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Straka, Milan, and Jana Straková. "Universal Dependencies 2.5 Models for UDPipe (2019-12-06)." http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/udpipe, December 6, 2019. https://lindat.mff.cuni.cz/repository/xmlui/handle/11234/1-3131.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 2.** Visualization of topic modelling results available on our digital library</figcaption></figure>

For the topic modelling, we use the statistical classification model LDA,<fnref n="16" /> where learning is performed with the Gibbs sampling algorithm<fnref n="17" /> to estimate the distribution of topics in the texts. The optimal number of topics is found using the R package LDA tuning<fnref n="18" />, which evaluates several possibilities (5, 10, 12, etc., topics) to select the most appropriate number based on statistical criteria. Stop words are removed<fnref n="19" />. The results reveal interesting themes in addition to more traditional themes in literature<fnref n="20" />, such as war (*moro, soldado, valiente*<fnref n="21" />...) or gallant (*amor, flor, bello, hermosura*<fnref n="22" />...) and tragic love (*adiós, vida, morir, alma*<fnref n="23" />...). One of the most important themes is that of the house as a privileged

setting for the story (*casa, puerta, calle*<fnref n="24" />...) associated with verbs of movement (*pasar, quedar, llegar, salir, sacar, entrar, quitar*<fnref n="25" />...) and the traditional characters of comedies (*caballero, dama, amigo, criado, señor*<fnref n="26" />...), testifying to the importance of comedy on the content of Spanish chapbooks<fnref n="27" />.

In a second step, co-occurrence networks enable us to identify associations of tokens linked to specific locations: they draw a sort of lexical field associated with place, and outline the imaginary attached to it. As the main shared question of the hackathon was the globalization of culture, we chose two locations: Cuba and Algiers. To select the words that are retained in the network, we used log likelihood values, a statistical measure that assesses the extent to which a word is associated with the network of another word<fnref n="28" />.

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Blei, David M.. Latent dirichlet allocation, The Journal of Machine Learning Research, Volume 3, 2003, pages 993 – 1022, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/944919.944937</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Griffiths, Thomas L., and Mark Steyvers. "Finding Scientific Topics." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101, no. suppl_1 (April 6, 2004): 5228-35. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0307752101.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Murzintcev, Nikita, and Chaney Nathan. "LDAtuning: Tuning of the Latent Dirichlet Allocation Models Parameters," 2020. https://cran.r-project.org/package=ldatuning.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Diaz, Gene, and Arthit Suriyawongkul. "Stopwordsiso." JavaScript. 2016. Reprint, Stopwords ISO, 2020. https://github.com/stopwords-iso/stopwords-iso.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Camps, Jean-Baptiste, Nicolas Baumard, Pierre-Carl Langlais, Olivier Morin, Thi-bault Clérice, and Jade Norindr. "Make Love or War? Monitoring the Thematic Evol-ution of Medieval French Narratives," 2023. https://enc.hal.science/hal-04250657.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Moor, soldier, brave.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Love, flower, beautiful, beauty.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ Farewell, life, to die, soul.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ House, door, street.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ To pass, to stay, to arrive, to go out, to take out, to enter, to remove.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Gentleman, lady, friend, servant, master.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Of the 912 documents preserved in Geneva, 43 are *Sainetes* (short comedic plays), making them the fourth most represented genre, following *Romances, Relaciones, and Canciones*.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Evert, Stefan. "Corpora and Collocations." In Volume 2, 1212–48. De Gruyter Mouton, 2009. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110213881.2.1212/html.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3. Co-occurrence network of Cuba</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 4.** Examples of chapbooks and woodcuts linked to mentions of Cuba. From left to right: *La guerra. Conversa entre dos soldats, un aragonés baturro y un catalá de Riudecanyas* Lo cas pasa en lo mes de Mars del any 1898, en una cantina de Guantánamo en la Isla de Cuba (Reus, Juan Grau, s.d.); *La insurrección en Cuba* (Barcelona, El Abanico, s.d.); *Decimas nuevas glosadas, para cantar los aficionados* (Palma, Guasp, s.d.).</figcaption></figure>

Cuba is directly cited 54 times in the corpus. Its network highlights three different clusters (Fig. 3). The first is linked to maritime travels (*pabellón*, *vapor*, *isla*<fnref n="29" />...) and the conquest (*pelear*, *español*<fnref n="30" />...); the second to people arriving from (former) Spanish harbours (*Nápoles*, *Almería*<fnref n="31" />...) with different skills (*comerciante*, *zapatero*, *pregonero*, *consejero*<fnref n="32" />...); and the third about debauchery (*pinta*, *licor*, *tinto*, *desvergonzado*<fnref n="33" />...).

These themes are echoed not only in the texts, those about Cuba being either songs or war stories, but also in the woodcuts that illustrate these documents: we find depictions of boats, soldiers, dancers and guitarists (Fig. 4). These visual and textual depictions refer to Cuba's strong historical maritime connections with Spain at the beginning of the 19th century, and La Habana as one of the main ports for transatlantic trade<fnref n="34" />.

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Nautical flag, steamboat, island.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ To fight, Spaniard.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ Naples, Almería.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² Merchant, shoemaker, town crier, advisor.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ Pint, liquor, red wine, shameless.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Gómez, Tomás. 2001. 'CUBA/ESPAGNE. Une histoire de famille(s)'. Caravelle. Cahiers du monde hispanique et luso-brésilien 76 (1): 485-94. https://doi.org/10.3406/carav.2001.1326. Goncalvès, Dominique. 2021. Le Planteur et le roi: L'aristocratie havanaise et la couronne d'Espagne (1763-1838). Casa de Velázquez. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cvz.14697.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 5.** Co-occurrence network of Algiers</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.** Examples of chapbooks and woodcuts linked to mentions of Algiers. From left to right: *Nuevo y curioso romance, en que se declara lo que les sucedió á dos finos amantes llamados don Jacinto del Castillo, y doña Leonor de la Rosa, los cuales se embarcaron por Venecia, y en medio de la mar fuéron apresados por unos cosarios argelinos, que dieron con ellos en la ciudad de Argel, donde fuéron quemados por la Fe de Jesucristo (Barcelona, Herederos de la Viuda Pla, s.d.); D. Jacinto del Castillo y Doña Leonor de la Rosa. Relación de la horrorosa muerte que sufrieron estos dos fieles amantes en Argelia, por ser firmes en sus promesas de amor y en la fé de Jesucristo (Barcelona, El Abanico, s.d.); El cautivo de Gerona. Nueva relación. De una carta que escribió á su padre un hijo, en que le daba á entender los tormentos que padecía en su cautiverío en la ciudad de Argel, y la contestacion que este le dá* (Carmona, José María Moreno, 1856).</figcaption></figure>

Algiers is more present in the corpus than any Mo-
roccan city, even if Morocco and Spain share strong
ties, economically, militarily, and territorially. As for
Cuba, we find the lexicon of maritime navigation
(navío, *fragata*<fnref n="35" />...), but with references to impris-
onment and shackling (a, cautivo, aprisionado,
apresar-<fnref n="36" />...) and forced conversions (Mahoma,
renegar-<fnref n="37" />...)

the “Barbaresques” in the Mediterranean Sea and
their various trades in goods and people, including
that of Christian slaves<fnref n="38" />. This is also evident in the
choice of woodcuts, which depict ships, people in
chains or wearing weapons or clothes traditionally
attributed to the inhabitants of Algiers in pliegos
printed after the conquest of Algeria by France in
1830 (Fig. 6).

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Ship, frigate.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Chain, captive, imprisoned, to seize.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Prophet Muhammad, to renounce.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Panzac, Daniel. Les corsaires barbaresques. La fin d'une épopée, 1800-1820. Paris, CNRS Éditions, 1999. Heers, Jacques. Les Barbaresques : La Course et la guerre en Méditerranée XIVe-XVIe siècle, Paris, Perrin, 2001.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 7.** Photo of the poster created during the hackathon to present our project at the Image Deluge & Globalization conference, organized by the Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Geneva</figcaption></figure>

## Review and Challenges

The greatest challenge encountered during the data processing pipeline arose from the diplomatic transcriptions,<fnref n="39" /> which retained numerous spelling particularities and typographical errors common in 19th-century Spanish popular literature. This presented a significant issue, as the lemmatizer used was trained on 20th-century Spanish. This experience demonstrated the need to allocate more time to either normalize the data or train a better lemmatizer dedicated to historical Spanish. Unfortunately, the time constraints of the hackathon did not allow for this, and corpus cleaning was not adequately considered (XML filtering, linguistic normalization of historical Spanish, etc.). Had we

addressed this at the outset, we might have avoided some of the errors encountered.

Nonetheless, the findings presented above have already been integrated into the project website,<fnref n="40" /> providing a strong foundation for future investigation. We intend to further enrich our research by incorporating additional chapbook collections, such as those from the Cambridge University Digital Library.<fnref n="41" /> Furthermore, we plan to explore new digital techniques to deepen our understanding of the texts and broaden the analytical perspectives, such as sentiment analysis, which could help to better characterize the authors' vision of places in the corpus.

<footnote n="39">³⁹ A transcription that preserves the original document’s spelling, punctuation, typography, and abbreviations without normalization.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ https://desenrollandoelcordel.unige.ch/exist/apps/projet-cordel/topic_modelling.html.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ Spanish Chapbooks Collection, Cambridge University Digital Library. Available at: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/spanishchapbooks.</footnote>
**Marina Berazategui** and **Fassaleh Taal** took part in the exploratory work produced as part of the University of Geneva hackathon. They are both trained in anthropology and museology and have worked on various research projects or exhibitions in Swiss museums and abroad. They are now exploring together alternative ways of transmitting social science research results, such as comics or animation films.

After studying literature, **Simon Gabay** wrote a PhD in medieval Latin philology at the University of Amsterdam. He then continued his philological research on modern documents at the University of Neuchâtel, during which he gradually computationalized his practice to become a specialist in Digital Humanities. He now teaches this discipline as a Maître-assistant at the University of Geneva.

**Pauline Jacsont** holds a Master's in Ancient and Medieval Literature (UniNe), a CAS in Digital Humanities (UniGE), and a MAS in Archival and Library Science (UniBE). Former scientific collaborator for Desenrollando el cordel 42 (2021–2024), she now works as a codicologist for the SAGW 43.

**Doctor Elina Leblanc** is a specialist in digital libraries and digital scholarly editions. From 2020 to 2024, she was part of the Desenrollando el cordel project, responsible for the digital aspects and the development of the website. She currently works for the Department of Culture of the City of Geneva, as well as for the SETAF 44 university project.

<footnote n="42">42 https://desenrollandoelcordel.unige.ch/exist/apps/projet-cordel/inicio.html</footnote>

<footnote n="43">43 The Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences is an umbrella association of 62 member societies, forming the largest network of humanities and social sciences in Switzerland. https://www.sagw.ch/sagw/</footnote>

<footnote n="44">44 SETAF: Evangelical printed matter in the French-speaking part of Switzerland at the time of the Reformation, https://www.unige.ch/setaf/</footnote>