Locating the Leading Edge of Cultural Change
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2024
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| _version_ | 1866909400005869568 |
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| author | Griebel, Sarah Cohen, Becca Li, Lucian Park, Jaihyun Liu, Jiayu Perkins, Jana Underwood, Ted |
| author_facet | Griebel, Sarah Cohen, Becca Li, Lucian Park, Jaihyun Liu, Jiayu Perkins, Jana Underwood, Ted |
| contents | Measures of textual similarity and divergence are increasingly used to study cultural change. But which measures align, in practice, with social evidence about change? We apply three different representations of text (topic models, document embeddings, and word-level perplexity) to three different corpora (literary studies, economics, and fiction). In every case, works by highly-cited authors and younger authors are textually ahead of the curve. We don't find clear evidence that one representation of text is to be preferred over the others. But alignment with social evidence is strongest when texts are represented through the top quartile of passages, suggesting that a text's impact may depend more on its most forward-looking moments than on sustaining a high level of innovation throughout. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_15068 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Locating the Leading Edge of Cultural Change Griebel, Sarah Cohen, Becca Li, Lucian Park, Jaihyun Liu, Jiayu Perkins, Jana Underwood, Ted Computation and Language Measures of textual similarity and divergence are increasingly used to study cultural change. But which measures align, in practice, with social evidence about change? We apply three different representations of text (topic models, document embeddings, and word-level perplexity) to three different corpora (literary studies, economics, and fiction). In every case, works by highly-cited authors and younger authors are textually ahead of the curve. We don't find clear evidence that one representation of text is to be preferred over the others. But alignment with social evidence is strongest when texts are represented through the top quartile of passages, suggesting that a text's impact may depend more on its most forward-looking moments than on sustaining a high level of innovation throughout. |
| title | Locating the Leading Edge of Cultural Change |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.15068 |