Change over time is often depicted as a trendline. But what does shape a trendline? Which forces? Our new paper presents a method allowing to “decompose” trendlines into constituent forces. Also, we tackle an old puzzle: Does culture change “one funeral at a time”? 🧵(1/8) doi.org/10.1098/rspb... - ThreadSky

sobchuk.bsky.social • 18 days ago

Change over time is often depicted as a trendline. But what does shape a trendline? Which forces? Our new paper presents a method allowing to “decompose” trendlines into constituent forces. Also, we tackle an old puzzle: Does culture change “one funeral at a time”? 🧵(1/8) https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2024.2033

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denismongin.bsky.social•18 days ago

📌

sobchuk.bsky.social•18 days ago

Max Planck (this guy ⬇️), who wasn't only interested in quantum physics, once wondered: “Does science advance one funeral at a time?” Literary scholar Franco Moretti also hypothesized that the rise and fall of book genres (e.g. gothic novel) is driven by the change of generations of writers (2/8)

sobchuk.bsky.social•18 days ago

So, we considered two possibilities. (1) Individuals – say, writers – always learn, changing their topics, e.g. in response to significant events, like the moon landing. Or (2) authors don’t change much over their careers, and the topics of their books are shaped during their formative years (3/8)

sobchuk.bsky.social•18 days ago

We used a corpus of 23,000 books by 6000 authors. Then we algorithmically extracted 200 major topics that these authors were writing on. Such topics have clear temporal trajectories ⬇️ (4/8)

sobchuk.bsky.social•18 days ago

Next, we borrowed a method from evolutionary ecology: decomposition analysis. It allows “dissecting” a trendline of a topic into underlying forces. We looked at the impact of new authors starting their career (🟦), established authors retiring (🟥), & authors changing their topics mid-career (🟨) (5/8)

sobchuk.bsky.social•18 days ago

Our finding: cohort turnover (🟦+🟥) is stronger than individual change (🟨): i.e writers don't change their topics much mid-career. This aligns with previous studies by @tedunderwood.me, @stephenvaisey.com, @oliviermorin.bsky.social, @wenyishang.bsky.social, @kkiley.bsky.social & F.Moretti. But… (6/8)

sobchuk.bsky.social•18 days ago

…but we can also answer Max Planck’s question. By decomposing the trendlines into constitutive forces, we show that literature doesn’t evolve “one funeral at a time” but... one birth at a time. The role of entrances (🟦) of new authors is twice as strong as the role of their retirements (🟥) (7/8)

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