Recent advances in cultural analytics and large-scale computational studies of art, literature and film often show that long-term change in the features of artistic works happens gradually. These findings suggest that conservative forces that shape creative domains might be underestimated. To this end, we provide the first large-scale formal evidence of the persistent association between poetic meter and semantics in 18-19th European literatures, using Czech, German and Russian collections with additional data from English poetry and early modern Dutch songs. Our study traces this association through a series of clustering experiments using the abstracted semantic features of 150,000 poems. With the aid of topic modeling we infer semantic features for individual poems. Texts were also lexically simplified across collections to increase generalizability and decrease the sparseness of word frequency distributions. Topics alone enable recognition of the meters in each observed language, as may be seen from highly robust clustering of same-meter samples (median Adjusted Rand Index between 0.48 and 1). In addition, this study shows that the strength of the association between form and meaning tends to decrease over time. This may reflect a shift in aesthetic conventions between the 18th and 19th centuries as individual innovation was increasingly favored in literature. Despite this decline, it remains possible to recognize semantics of the meters from past or future, which suggests the continuity of semantic traditions while also revealing the historical variability of conditions across languages. This paper argues that distinct metrical forms, which are often copied in a language over centuries, also maintain long-term semantic inertia in poetry. Our findings, thus, highlight the role of the formal features of cultural items in influencing the pace and shape of cultural evolution.
翻译:文化分析以及艺术、文学和电影的大规模计算研究最近的进展往往表明艺术作品特征的长期变化是逐渐发生的。这些研究结果表明,影响创作领域的保守力量可能会被低估。为此,我们提供了18-19欧洲文献中诗性计量和语义学之间持续关联的第一批大规模正式证据,利用来自英国诗歌和早期现代荷兰歌曲的额外数据,利用来自捷克、德国和俄罗斯的藏书以及来自英国诗歌和早期荷兰歌曲的额外数据。我们的研究通过一系列分组实验,利用15万首诗的抽象语义特征进行一系列集群实验,追溯到这一联系。我们用专题模型来模拟各首首首首首首首首首首诗作品创作创作创作创作领域领域的创作性力量。这些文字在收藏中也被从法律上简化了,增加了可概括性,减少了字频谱分布的分散性。单题本身就能够识别每种所观察到的语种语言的米表(中间为0.48至1级的中间调校正的Rand指数 ) 。此外,这一研究还表明,我们的形式和含义之间的联系会随着时间的变化而逐渐减少。这也许反映出18世纪和19世纪的历史传统之间的历史价值。