Forgotten books: The application of unseen species models to the survival of culture

Abstract

The study of ancient cultures is hindered by the incomplete survival of material artifacts, so we commonly underestimate the diversity of cultural production in historic societies. To correct this survivorship bias, we applied unseen species models from ecology to gauge the loss of narratives from medieval Europe, such as the romances about King Arthur. The estimates obtained are compatible with the scant historic evidence. In addition to events such as library fires, we identified the original evenness of cultural populations as an overlooked factor in these assemblages’ stability in the face of immaterial loss. We link the elevated evenness in island literatures to analogous accounts of ecological and cultural diversity in insular communities. These analyses call for a wider application of these methods across the heritage sciences.

Lost Manuscripts and Extinct Texts: A Dynamic Model of Cultural Transmission

“…Combining previous inquiries by Weitzman and Cisne with the power of computer simulations and the methodology of statistical physics, we are able to reproduce the evolutionary process that underlies the observable data for, at least, some textual traditions such as those from medieval French epics and romances. The results obtained can even corroborate or refine results obtained by unrelated methodologies, such as those recently published by Kestemont et al [49], indicating that these relatively simple birth-and-death process have relevancy in philology as well as they have in Evolutionary Biology for instance. This method then provides us a way to account both for population dynamics in time, loss or production estimates, as well as the shape of the stemmata (the phylogenies) of manuscripts, answering the century long Bédier observation [13], whose lack of solution until now has been at the core of a lasting schism in philological studies.…”

“…In particular, values of 0.55 for the survival of works and 0.05 for the survival of manuscripts (fig. 3), A and B, red squared area, bottom-right tile) are identical to those provided by Kestemont et al for Old French chivalric romances, using unrelated methods from ecodiversity [49]. Yet, for what regards specifically Old French epics, known as chanson de geste -a genre predating the later form of the roman, and whose circulation and reception considerably differs for a long time -, the median final population of 2 and the third quartile of LCA outdegree of 2 (though, median LCA Shannon index is 0.69) 3 .…”

Demystifying Chao1 with Good-Turing

“…In the cultural domain, too, there have been attempts to correct biases in our observations with statistical methods. A good example is our study into the loss of European medieval literature (Kestemont et al 2022), which was recently published in the journal Science. In that study, we apply a specific "Unseen Species" model to medieval stories.…”

Bearing a Bag-of-Tales: An Open Corpus of Annotated Folktales for Reproducible Research

“…The convergence of two major trends in computational folkloristics (Abello, Broadwell, & Tangherlini, 2012) will likely shape the results of the next decade. The first is a focus on the evolutionary aspect of motif and/or tale type distributions, either with regard to certain tale types (Bortolini et al, 2017;Karsdorp, 2016;Karsdorp & van den Bosch, 2013;da Silva & Tehrani, 2016;Tehrani, 2013), or to the geographical distribution of globally occurring narrative motifs (Thuillard, d'Huy, Berezkin, & Le Quellec, 2018), even inferring the presence of lost narratives (Kestemont et al, 2022). A genetic metaphor seems to inform some approaches, perhaps inspired by the modelling capacities inherent in Dawkins' meme theory (Dawkins, 1976); these compare tale types as motif sequences to 'narrative DNA' (Darányi, Wittek, & Forró, 2012;Meder et al, 2016;Murphy, 2015;Ofek, Darányi, & Rokach, 2013), or look at the evolution of narrative/story networks as a quasi-biological process based on the mutation and recombination of narrative elements (Karsdorp, 2016;Karsdorp & Fonteyn, 2019), extended even to the framework of cultural evolution via population genetics (Ross, Greenhill & Atkinson, 2013;Ross & Atkinson, 2015).…”