Alba Morollon Diaz-Faes ; Carla Sofia Ribeiro Murteira ; Martin Ruskov - Values That Are Explicitly Present in Fairy Tales: Comparing Samples from German, Italian and Portuguese Traditions

jdmdh:13120 - Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities, June 4, 2024, NLP4DH - https://doi.org/10.46298/jdmdh.13120
Values That Are Explicitly Present in Fairy Tales: Comparing Samples from German, Italian and Portuguese TraditionsArticle

Authors: Alba Morollon Diaz-Faes ORCID; Carla Sofia Ribeiro Murteira ORCID; Martin Ruskov ORCID

    Looking at how social values are represented in fairy tales can give insights about the variations in communication of values across cultures. We study how values are communicated in fairy tales from Portugal, Italy and Germany using a technique called word embedding with a compass to quantify vocabulary differences and commonalities. We study how these three national traditions differ in their explicit references to values. To do this, we specify a list of value-charged tokens, consider their word stems and analyse the distance between these in a bespoke pre-trained Word2Vec model. We triangulate and critically discuss the validity of the resulting hypotheses emerging from this quantitative model. Our claim is that this is a reusable and reproducible method for the study of the values explicitly referenced in historical corpora. Finally, our preliminary findings hint at a shared cultural understanding and the expression of values such as Benevolence, Conformity, and Universalism across the studied cultures, suggesting the potential existence of a pan-European cultural memory.


    Volume: NLP4DH
    Published on: June 4, 2024
    Accepted on: April 9, 2024
    Submitted on: February 27, 2024
    Keywords: Computer Science - Computation and Language,Computer Science - Computers and Society,J.5,K.4.m

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