Cultural longevity and success

This project, which makes up most of my dissertation research, is concerned with the factors that contribute towards different rates of decay of the collective memory of cultural products and the attention they can attract on themselves. Informed by cultural evolution and biocultural criticism, my approach heavily relies on methods from the computational humanities—a crucial aspect being “operationalizing” or quantifying, measuring, analyzing, and visualizing cultural data. Most of this research is currently targeted at late Victorian novels (which is my dissertation topic), but the insight gotten from this research is not medium specific and can be applied to other cultural products as well.

To see more about the theoretical foundation of this project, check out my review of Alberto Acerbi’s Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age, published in the Fall 2020, 4.2. issue of Evolutionary Studies of Imaginative Culture. To see my research dealing with negativity bias as a factor behind the divergent cultural longevity of late Victorian novels, see the conference paper “Weak negative correlation between the mean emotional valence and present day popularity of late Victorian novels”, published in the proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research 2020 conference.