Digital Reconstruction of a Feminist Literary Past: Topic Modelling Elisa Mújica's Newspaper Criticism (1972–1974)

Elisa Mújica (1918–2003) is increasingly recognised as one of the most important Colombian women writers of the twentieth century. Yet her work as a critic in the Lecturas Dominicales supplement in the newspaper El Tiempo – a central venue in the Colombian literary field – remains under-studied. This article presents a mixed-methods analysis of Mújica's columns from 1972 to 1974, combining topic modelling with close reading under the framework of data feminism. Using latent Dirichlet allocation implemented in R on a corpus of 572 document segments derived from digitised columns, I model six topics. Rather than treating these topics as purely formal clusters, I read them as traces of gendered practices in a literary field still dominated by male authors and authorities. Guided by data feminism (D'Ignazio and Klein 2020), I argue that topic modelling can help make visible the asymmetrical distribution of gendered authority in the archive, while close reading reveals how Mújica simultaneously participates in and questions masculinised canons. The article demonstrates how computational methods and feminist theory can jointly illuminate the politics of literary value in twentieth-century Latin America. Published version, formatted by the journal. Published in Transformations: A DARIAH Journal, Issue 02 ("The Past"), 15 September 2026, https://doi.org/10.46298/transformations.17210. Corpus metadata and R code: 10.5281/zenodo.20550727.