Values That Are Explicitly Present in Fairy Tales: Comparing Samples from German, Italian and Portuguese Traditions
This study addresses the problem of understanding cultural value communication in historical texts for researchers in cultural studies and computational linguistics, but it is incremental as it applies an existing method to new data.
The researchers tackled the problem of comparing social values in fairy tales across German, Italian, and Portuguese traditions by using word embeddings to quantify vocabulary differences, finding preliminary evidence of shared values like Benevolence, Conformity, and Universalism, suggesting a potential pan-European cultural memory.
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.