Harriet Martineau in Brazil and Abroad: A Brief Review of Academic Literature via Topic Modeling

Abstract

This literature review maps the academic production on Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), with two objectives. The first is to identify the latent themes of that production and situate Brazilian scholarship in relation to international output. The second is to explore BERTopic as a tool for textual analysis in the Social Sciences. The search was conducted in the OpenAlex repository using the Boolean term "Harriet Martineau" in the title or abstract, with no restrictions on period, language, or document type. The corpus comprised 1,016 records covering the period from 1837 to 2026. Geographic data (available for 33.4% of records) indicates concentration in the United States (145 works) and the United Kingdom (138 works). Brazil ranks third with 14 works, 1.4% of the total corpus. Thematic mapping was conducted with BERTopic. The model identified 13 topics: Victorian women's writing, healthcare, Martineau as a pioneer of sociology, abolitionism, political economy, Victorian journalism, correspondence and epistolary writing, gender studies, deafness, translation and travel narratives, positivism and Auguste Comte, religion and spirituality, illness and disability. The qualitative analysis of the 12 Brazilian open-access works shows that national production concentrates on two axes: Martineau as a founder of sociology and gender perspectives. Topics such as nursing, journalism, abolitionism, and Martineau's deafness are poorly represented or absent from Brazilian production. None of the works analyzed treats deafness as an autonomous object of sociological analysis.