Spectator periodicals contributed to spreading the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, a turning point in human history and the foundation of our modern societies. In this work, we study the spirit and atmosphere captured in the spectator periodicals about important social issues from the 18^th century by analyzing text sentiment of those periodicals. Specifically, based on a manually annotated corpus of over 3 700 issues published in five different languages and over a period of more than one hundred years, we conduct a three-fold sentiment analysis: First, we analyze the development of sentiment over time as well as the influence of topics and narrative forms on sentiment. Second, we construct sentiment networks to assess the polarity of perceptions between different entities, including periodicals, places and people. Third, we construct and analyze sentiment word networks to determine topological differences between words with positive and negative polarity allowing us to make conclusions on how sentiment was expressed in spectator periodicals.Our results depict a mildly positive tone in spectator periodicals underlining the positive attitude towards important topics of the Age of Enlightenment, but also signaling stylistic devices to disguise critique in order to avoid censorship. We also observe strong regional variation in sentiment, indicating cultural and historic differences between countries. For example, while Italy perceived other European countries as positive role models, French periodicals were frequently more critical towards other European countries. Finally, our topological analysis depicts a weak overrepresentation of positive sentiment words corroborating our findings about a general mildly positive tone in spectator periodicals.We believe that our work based on the combination of the sentiment analysis of spectator periodicals and the extensive knowledge available from literary studies sheds interesting new light on these publications. Furthermore, we demonstrate the inclusion of sentiment analysis as another useful method in the digital humanist’s distant reading toolbox.

中文翻译：

---

启蒙时代的文本情感：对观众期刊的分析

观众期刊有助于传播启蒙时代的思想，人类历史的转折点和现代社会的基础。在这项工作中，我们研究了18^世纪以来观众在期刊中捕捉到的关于重要社会问题的精神和氛围通过分析那些期刊的文本情感来分析世纪。具体来说，我们以人工注释的语料库为基础，该语料库以五种不同的语言在一百多年的时间内发布了3700多个问题，我们进行了三方面的情感分析：首先，我们还分析了情感随着时间的发展作为主题和叙述形式对情感的影响。其次，我们构建情感网络来评估不同实体（包括期刊，地点和人物）之间的感知极性。第三，我们构建和分析情感词网络，以确定具有正负极性的单词之间的拓扑差异，从而使我们可以得出关于如何在观众期刊中表达情感的结论。我们的结果描绘了观众期刊上的温和积极基调，突显了对启蒙时代重要主题的积极态度，同时也发出了掩饰批评以避免批评的风格手段。我们还观察到情绪方面的强烈地区差异，表明国家之间的文化和历史差异。例如，尽管意大利认为其他欧洲国家是积极的榜样，但法国期刊对其他欧洲国家的批评往往更为重要。最后，我们的拓扑分析显示了积极情绪词的微弱过分表达，证实了我们关于观众期刊中一般轻微积极语气的发现。我们认为，基于对观众期刊的情感分析和文学研究的广泛知识的结合，我们的工作为这些出版物提供了有趣的新思路。此外，我们演示了将情感分析作为数字人文主义者的远程阅读工具箱中另一种有用的方法。