Can We Map Culture?

Abstract

Images that convert culture into physical space have a durable appeal, and numbers make it possible to literalize a spatial representation of culture by measuring the “distances” between cultural artifacts. But do cultural relationships really behave like physical distance? There are good reasons to think the analogy is imperfect, and a number of alternative geometries have been proposed—extending, in a few cases, to a systematic distinction between the mathematics of “embodied experience” and “epistemic experience” (Chang and DeDeo 2020). We test several proposed alternatives to spatial metrics against ground truth implicit in human behavior. While it is sometimes possible to improve on distance metrics, we do not yet find evidence that the information-theoretical measures recommended as appropriate for epistemic questions are generally preferable in the cultural domain.

Semantics of European poetry is shaped by conservative forces: The relationship between poetic meter and meaning in accentual-syllabic verse

“…In contrast, both the German and Dutch corpora show higher semantic recognizability from the future to the past than in the opposite direction. The assymetry suggests semantic accumulation over time, a pattern where later metrical semantics “enclose” [ 41 , 42 ] the early usage of a form but are already too different to be recognizable from the past. The recognizability of Czech forms stays stable at a level barely above the random baseline: it is likely connected to this tradition being in a volatile establishment state and changing its metrical preferences midway through the 19th century ( S4 Fig ).…”