IPHS 300: AI for Humanity
Document Type
Poster
Publication Date
Spring 2025
Abstract
This project explores how the narratives of personal growth in self-help literature have evolved between the 1970s and the 2010s. The goal was to identify which themes persisted across eras and how others shifted in response to broader cultural and technological changes. I hypothesized that 1970s texts would emphasize self-control and traditional success, while 2010s texts would highlight flexibility, mental well-being, and authenticity, with some shared focus on motivation and habit-building. To test this, I selected five bestselling books from each decade and applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling using a Colab-based notebook. The top 30 most salient terms generated for each corpus were then analyzed to derive dominant themes. The results confirmed my hypothesis: the 1970s literature was shaped by themes of moral authority, discipline, and religious framing, while the 2010s emphasized emotional resilience, personal agency, and authentic self-expression. Despite these differences, both eras maintained a strong emphasis on growth and action, reinforcing the genre’s consistent aim of empowering individuals to pursue a “better self”, even as the definition of self-improvement continues to evolve.
Recommended Citation
Aslam, Ayesha, "Changing Narratives of Self-Improvement: Self-Help Literature Across Two Eras" (2025). IPHS 300: AI for Humanity. Paper 50.
https://digital.kenyon.edu/dh_iphs_ai/50
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.