Related papers: On the transmission of texts: written cultures as …
How did written works evolve, disappear or survive down through the ages? In this paper, we propose a unified, formal framework for two fundamental questions in the study of the transmission of texts: how much was lost or preserved from all…
Taking its point of departure in the recent developments in the field of digital humanities and the increasing automatisation of scholarly workflows, this study explores the implications of digital approaches to textual traditions for the…
Stemmatology is a subfield of philology where one approach to understand the copy-history of textual variants of a text (witnesses of a tradition) is to generate an evolutionary tree. Computational methods are partly shared between the…
In recent years, with the advent of highly scalable artificial-neural-network-based text representation methods the field of natural language processing has seen unprecedented growth and sophistication. It has become possible to distill…
Translation has played an important role in trade, law, commerce, politics, and literature for thousands of years. Translators have always tried to be invisible; ideal translations should look as if they were written originally in the…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
Intertextuality is a key concept in literary theory that challenges traditional notions of text, signification or authorship. It views texts as part of a vast intertextual network that is constantly evolving and being reconfigured. This…
We consider a Moran-type model of cultural evolution, which describes how traits emerge, are transmitted, and get lost in populations. Our analysis focuses on the underlying cultural genealogies; they were first described by Aguilar and…
The application of phylogenetic techniques to the documentation of cultural history can present a distorted picture due to horizontal transmission and blending. Moreover, the units of cultural transmission must be communicable concepts,…
Witnesses of medieval literary texts, preserved in manuscript, are layered objects , being almost exclusively copies of copies. This results in multiple and hard to distinguish linguistic strata -- the author's scripta interacting with the…
Computer simulations are an important tool for studying the mechanics of biological evolution. In particular, in silico work with agent-based models provides an opportunity to collect high-quality records of ancestry relationships among…
We review the task of aligning simple models for language dynamics with relevant empirical data, motivated by the fact that this is rarely attempted in practice despite an abundance of abstract models. We propose that one way to meet this…
The scientific enterprise depends critically on the preservation of and open access to published data. This basic tenet applies acutely to phylogenies (estimates of evolutionary relationships among species). Increasingly, phylogenies are…
We use an information-theoretic measure of linguistic similarity to investigate the organization and evolution of scientific fields. An analysis of almost 20M papers from the past three decades reveals that the linguistic similarity is…
The quest for historically impactful science and technology provides invaluable insight into the innovation dynamics of human society, yet many studies are limited to qualitative and small-scale approaches. Here, we investigate scientific…
In this paper, we wish to investigate the dynamics of information transfer in evolutionary dynamics. We use information theoretic tools to track how much information an evolving population has obtained and managed to retain about different…
Stochastic modeling of phylogenies raises five questions that have received varying levels of attention from quantitatively inclined biologists. 1) How large do we expect (from the model) the ration of maximum historical diversity to…
As large language models (LLMs) start interacting with each other and generating an increasing amount of text online, it becomes crucial to better understand how information is transformed as it passes from one LLM to the next. While…
In phylogenetic studies, the evolution of molecular sequences is assumed to have taken place along the phylogeny traced by the ancestors of extant species. In the presence of lateral gene transfer (LGT), however, this may not be the case,…
A wide variety of cultural practices take the form of "tacit" knowledge, where the rules and principles are neither obvious to an observer nor known explicitly by the practitioners. This poses a problem for cultural evolution: if beginners…