Exploring Spanish contemporary song lyrics through Digital Humanities methods: Some thematic and structural properties

In this article, we present a quantitative study with Digital Humanities methods on an extensive corpus of Spanish contemporary song lyrics, a type of text related to poetry. On the one hand, poetry and songs not only have been connected since their origins, but they share some characteristics, such as the division in lines or the use of rhymes. On the other hand, Digital Humanities quantitative approaches have already been applied to poetry, but we still lack a study in the same fashion for lyrics. Taking advantage of the advances in automatic scansion and syllabification, rhyme detection, or Topic Modeling technologies, the present study analyzes Spanish contemporary song lyrics’ main thematic and structural properties, comparing them with those used in poetic texts. Our results offered new insights into the characteristics of the analyzed texts and their connections to poetic ones.