Combining Qualitative and Computational Approaches for Literary Analysis of Finnish Novels

What can we learn from the classics of Finnish literature by using computational emotion analysis? This article tries to answer this question by examining how computational methods of sentiment analysis can be used in the study of literary works in conjunction with a qualitative or more 'traditional' approach to literature and affect. We present and develop a simple but robust computational approach of affect analysis that uses a carefully curated emotion lexicon adapted to Finnish turn-of-the-century literary texts combined with word embeddings to map out the semantic emotional spaces of seminal works of Finnish literature. We focus our qualitative analysis on selected case studies: four works by Juhani Aho, Minna Canth, Maria Jotuni, and F. E. Sillanpää, but provide emotion arcs for a total of 975 Finnish novels. We argue that a computational analysis of a text's lexicon can be valuable in evaluating the large distribution of the emotional valence in a text and provide guidelines to help other researchers replicate our findings. We show that computational approaches have a place in traditional studies on affect in literature as a support tool for close-reading-based analyses, but also allowing for large-scale comparison between, for example, genres or national canons.