The Distant Reading of Religious Texts: A “Big Data” Approach to Mind-Body Concepts in Early China

Slingerland, Edward; Nichols, Ryan; Neilbo, Kristoffer; Logan, Carson

doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfw090

Cited by 25 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…The traditional content-analytical method of using pre-set dictionaries to match characters with possible words in the corpus confronts computational problems, and the permutations and ambiguities of language often lead to poor results. Customized dictionaries improve fit, but still yield substantial inaccuracies (Allen et al, 2017;Slingerland, Nichols, Neilbo, & Logan, 2017). Such word segmentation processes also make comparative analysis and theorization of multiple-language corpora feasible.…”

Section: Corpus Linguistics Within Management This Trend Of Engaginmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topic Modeling in Management Research: Rendering New Theory from Textual Data

Hannigan

Haans

Vakili

et al. 2019

ANNALS

373

251

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____ We would like to thank the editors of the Academy of Management Annals for their support and helpful comments. We also thank the participants in our various topic modeling presentations and reviewers and division organizers (specifically Peer Fiss and Renate Meyer) at the Academy of Management meetings. In addition, we would like to recognize Marc-David Seidel and Christopher Steele from the Interpretive Data Science (IDeaS) group for their role in germinating these ideas, Mike Pfarrer for his comments on a later draft of the paper, and Kara Gehman for her fine-grained edits on next-to-final drafts. Finally, we wish to express our appreciation to our life partners for not only putting up with, but actively discussing this paper as it evolved.

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Section: Corpus Linguistics Within Management This Trend Of Engaginmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topic Modeling in Management Research: Rendering New Theory from Textual Data

Hannigan

Haans

Vakili

et al. 2019

ANNALS

373

251

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Due to recent digitalization efforts, it seems that this should be possible (cf. Elwert et al 2015;Slingerland et al 2017). Third, the texts in our corpus represent only a subselection of extant ancient Greek texts.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this way, these methods have been successfully applied for studying changes of norms in cultural evolution of language (Amato et al 2018), long-term changes in emotional expressions (Morin and Acerbi 2017) or to examine presence of cognitive bias toward mind-body dualism in texts from ancient China (Slingerland et al 2017). The current study follows this research pathway in an attempt to contribute to an ongoing debate on cultural evolution of prosocial religion.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Emergence of Big Gods in the Ancient Mediterranean

Kaše¹

2018

Preprint

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Macro-historical data from several independent cultural environments reveal that the emergence of morally oriented religious systems, including representations of powerful and morally concerned deities, represents relatively recent development in human evolutionary history. The cultural evolutionary scholarship disagrees regarding what was the main factor responsible for the emergence and spread of these innovations over the past few millennia. Proponents of the Big Gods Hypothesis suggest that this development should be primarily associated with changes in social complexity, since representations of powerful and morally concerned deities represent a factor promoting cooperation among strangers in large-scale societies and thus a cultural selection advantage for groups adopting these innovations. Advocates of the Affluence Hypothesis suggest that the emergence and spread of morally oriented religious systems has to be primarily coupled with economic development, namely with an increase in affluence, which occurred during the so-called “Axial Age” period. According to this proposal, an increase in affluence enabled adoption of "slow" life-history strategies by certain proportion of the population, what led to emergence of new form of religion, emphasizing morality, long-terms goals and practices of self-control. This paper contributes to this debate by focusing on historical setting often referred to in both of these proposals: the ancient Mediterranean. Using quantitative text analysis methods in analyzing a corpus of ancient Greek texts from the period from 800 BC to 400 CE, this study offers a more nuanced view of the process under scrutiny than the one which has been proposed in previous ethnographic and comparative studies. Finding statistically significant differences in the context of usage of the Greek term theos (god) in the texts from the pre-axial and axial period, the obtained results can be more easily interpreted in terms of the Affluence Hypothesis than in terms of the competing account.

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“…The country-level and language-level analyses both allow us to test how widely the 3d To study classical China, we examined 96 texts from the Chinese Text Project, totaling 5.7 million characters (25,26). The texts were stripped of punctuation and then used to train a 100d fastText embedding.…”

Section: Historical Societies Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

The 3d Mind Model characterizes how people understand mental states across modern and historical cultures

Thornton¹,

Reilly²,

Slingerland³

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

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Humans rely on social interaction to achieve many important goals. These interactions rely on people’s capacity to understand others’ mental states: their thoughts and feelings. Do different cultures realize this ability in different ways, or do universal principles describe how all peoples understand mental states? Here we investigated mental state representation in 57 countries, 17 languages, and 4 historical societies. We quantified mental state meaning by analyzing large bodies of text produced by each culture. We then tested whether a theory of mental state representation – the 3d Mind Model – could explain which mental states were similar within each culture. The model explained mental state representation in all studied cultures, indicating that universal principles describe how people understand other minds.

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The Distant Reading of Religious Texts: A “Big Data” Approach to Mind-Body Concepts in Early China

Cited by 25 publications

References 26 publications

Topic Modeling in Management Research: Rendering New Theory from Textual Data

Topic Modeling in Management Research: Rendering New Theory from Textual Data

The Emergence of Big Gods in the Ancient Mediterranean

The 3d Mind Model characterizes how people understand mental states across modern and historical cultures

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