The Portuguese literary wolf

The rise and fall of biodiversity in literature: A comprehensive quantification of historical changes in the use of vernacular labels for biological taxa in Western creative literature

“…Although we cannot guarantee that we found every individual taxon label within the corpus without any false positives, we argue that our comprehensive approach is likely to reveal the relevant patterns of use of taxon labels. In contrast, approaches using limited taxon label lists (Kesebir & Kesebir, 2017;Queiroz et al, 2015) can be misleading, as they may ignore potentially compensating trends exhibited by labels not covered by the corresponding list. In several cases (Ladle et al, 2016;Proulx et al, 2014) such investigations have been carried out using the Google Books (Davies, 2011) corpus accessed via the Google Ngram Viewer (Lin et al, 2012).…”

“…In contrast to related studies (Kesebir & Kesebir, 2017;McCrindle & Odendaal, 1994;Queiroz et al, 2015;Willemen et al, 2015;Wolff et al, 1999) that either only analysed a small fraction of the size of our corpus or searched only for a limited set of taxon labels (an order between 1 and 10² labels), we aimed for a comprehensive investigation that tried to find every non-human living being that is mentioned in the corpus. This comprehensiveness was the precondition for calculating the diversity of taxon labels using both richness (number of taxon labels) and diversity indices, for example Shannon diversity (Magurran & McGill, 2011, Chapter 5), and for evaluating this biodiversity in literature (BiL) against the background of changes in general lexical richness, which we determine by the number of types (unique tokens).…”

Exploring Literary Landscapes: From Texts to Spatiotemporal Analysis through Collaborative Work and GIS

“…From an eco-critical perspective, this approach can be seen as 'an example of the advantages of researching into an enlarged sample of literary texts, producing accurate and comparable results and discussing them using current ecological knowledge'. 43 …”

The relation between biodiversity in literature and social and spatial situation of authors: Reflections on the nature–culture entanglement

“…For improving human well-being and developing a sustainable society protecting and using biodiversity, it is essential to understand the determinants of people's valuation of living nature. To this end, first attempts have been made to qualitatively assess (Ainscough et al, 2019;Queiroz et al, 2015) and, more recently, quantitatively investigate cultural products like literature or movies (Celis-Diez et al, 2016;Langer et al, 2021;Prévot-Julliard et al, 2015) with respect to references to living nature. In particular, we apply a measure of mentioned biodiversity in literature (BiL) within a size-normalised work proposed by Langer et al (2021).…”