DIGIHUMi ettekanne: Oleg Sobchuk

• 21 April: Oleg Sobchuk (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)

"Studying Cultural Evolution with Large Data"

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Abstract

Cultural evolution is an emerging field of research that studies regularities in cultural change: the internal mechanics of long-term shifts in various domains – language, traditions, religions. In this talk, I will argue that the cultural-evolutionary perspective can be fruitfully applied to humanities: to the scholarship of literature, films, songs, and visual arts. This perspective allows us to rethink several key questions in the humanities: 1) about popularity, i.e why do certain books/films/songs become more popular than others? 2) about creativity, i.e. how do new artistic forms emerge? 3) about historical process itself, i.e. how are cultural items transmitted? As an example of the first question – about popularity – I will present a study, done with my co-authors Mason Youngblood and Olivier Morin, of the causes of popularity in music. Namely, we are asking whether the principle of first-mover advantage influences the popularity of songs. The first-mover advantage hypothesis is borrowed from economics; it claims that companies that enter a new market niche early on become more successful. In music, a genre is analogous to a niche, and early representatives of a genre may be considered first movers. To test whether early representatives of music genres are indeed more successful, we study ten new music genres using large data on musical success collected by the Spotify streaming service.

Biography

Oleg Sobchuk is a postdoctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany), who defended his PhD thesis at the University of Tartu. He is studying the cultural evolution of arts: that is, discovering and explaining long-term patterns in the history of books, movies, songs, video games, and other art forms. For this, he analyzes large digital libraries (such as HathiTrust) and artistic datasets (such as IMDb or Spotify), and does statistical modeling and text mining. His work has appeared in New Left Review, Evolutionary Human Sciences, Poetics Today, and other journals. Also, he is currently writing the book Stories Evolve: The Cultural Evolution of Narratives for Oxford University Press.