Stories do not fossilize. Thus, exploring tales shared during prehistory, the longest part of human history inevitably becomes speculative. Nevertheless, various attempts have been made to find a ...more scientifically valid way into our deep human past of storytelling. Following the social brain hypothesis, we suggest including into the theory of human storytelling more fine-grained and evidence-based findings (from archaeology, the cognitive sciences, and evolutionary psychology) about the manifold exaptation and adaptation, genetic changes, and phenotypic plasticity in the deep human past, which all shaped the emergence of storytelling in hominins. We identify three preconditions for humans sharing stories: first, the long evolution of language in the different taxa as one of the preconditions of ostensive signaling; second, the pivotal role of childhood in the evolution of collaborative intentionality; and third, the role of fireside chats in the rise of elaborative (i.e., narrative) sharing of stories. We propose that humans, albeit perhaps no other hominins learned to understand others through sharing stories, not only as intentional agents, but also as mental ones.
The end of deep reading is a commonplace in public debates, whenever societies talk about youth, books, and the digital age. In contrast to this, we show for the first time and in detail, how ...intensively young readers write and comment literary texts at an unprecedented scale. We present several analyses of how fiction is transmitted through the social reading platform Wattpad, one of the largest platforms for user-generated stories, including novels, fanfiction, humour, classics, and poetry. By mixed quantitative and qualitative methods and scalable reading we scrutinise texts and comments on Wattpad, what themes are preferred in 13 languages, what role does genre play for readers behaviour, and what kind of emotional engagement is prevalent when young readers share stories. Our results point out the rise of a global reading culture in youth reading besides national preferences for certain topics and genres, patterns of reading engagement, aesthetic values and social interaction. When reading Teen Fiction social-bonding (affective interaction) is prevalent, when reading Classics social-cognitive interaction (collective intelligence) is prevalent. An educational outcome suggests that readers who engage in Teen Fiction learn to read Classics and to judge books not only in direct emotional response to character's behaviour, but focusing more on contextualised interpretation of the text.
Man spricht schon zeitgenössisch von einem regelrechten „Asienfieber“, als um 1900 die Faszination für die Kunst Asiens in der Malerei, Musik und Dichtkunst kaum eine Grenze zu kennen schien. Der ...Erfolg von Hans Bethges Anthologie Die chinesische Flöte (1907) fügt sich in diese widerspruchsvollen Konstellationen von Exotismus und kolonialer Expansion, weltabgewandter Reflexion und literarischem Aufbruch ein. Bethges Sammlung hat mit Gustav Mahlers Lied von der Erde (1911) jene Verdichtung erfahren, die Bethges Gedicht zum Inbegriff einer west-östlichen Wahlverwandtschaft gemacht haben. Der Band versammelt globalhistorische Untersuchungen zu Hans Bethge und der kolonialen Literatur um 1900, zu Mahler und dem Exotismus in der Musik, den literarischen Bewegungen in China und den Globalisierungen der Kultur in den Weltausstellungen.
If the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, as assumed by Boucher and Osgood's (1969) famous Pollyanna hypothesis and computationally confirmed for large text corpora ...in several languages (Dodds et al., 2015), then children and youth literature (CYL) should also show a Pollyanna effect. Here we tested this prediction applying an unsupervised vector space model-based sentiment analysis tool called
(Jacobs, 2019) to two CYL corpora, one in English (372 books) and one in German (500 books). Pitching our analysis at the sentence level, and assessing semantic as well as lexico-grammatical information, both corpora show the Pollyanna effect and thus add further evidence to the universality hypothesis. The results of our multivariate sentiment analyses provide interesting testable predictions for future scientific studies of literature.
We introduce childPoeDE: the first corpus of German poetry for children comprising poems which are still read today and cover a wide range of topics and authors. ChildPoeDE contains poem texts and ...both poem-level and token-level metadata. Poem-level metadata includes information about the anthologies and authors, quantitative text features, rhyme and lexical richness. Token-level metadata covers word length, position and frequency, parts-of-speech, onomatopoeia and sonority. This corpus can be used for computational text analysis, but also as a source for stimulus material in experimental studies. The corpus metadata is freely accessible via Zenodo. The poem texts are protected by copyright.
Not many scholarly traditions are so close to computational approaches as the tradition of folklore respectively folktale studies. Since the days of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson folktales have been ...studied based on large collections of stories, comparison of genres and motifs, and historical and cultural stemmatologies. Even though no one was talking about data or data modelling in those heydays of folktale research, the formalization of tales was still the heart of folktale studies right from the start when around 1900 academic societies and researchers systematise the field of research. One could even point to Johann Georg von Hahn’s early attempts in the nineteenth century to support this claim. ‘Formulae’ or story radicals, as Hahn’s wording was translated, are basically already in 1864 breaking down complex stories into motifs, count and classify the motifs, correlate the sites of finding with stories and compare the motifs over large geographical and cultural distances. It is of no exaggeration to point out that since more than one hundred years, the research agenda of folktale studies has been noticeable similar to today’s computational approaches (Voigt 1976).
What will become of successful universities once everything is digitalized? Experts from schools and universities, policymakers, journalists, and computer scientists present their responses, ...expectations, and trepidations, under the overarching premise of humanely shaping the digital revolution. The essays were developed from the course “Humans/Machines/The Future” presented in 2019 at the former Diessen cloister in Ammersee.
Das wissenschaftliche Publikationssystem ist in seinen Grundzügen nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg entworfen und dann in die einmal eingeschlagene Richtung zum Nachteil der Wissenschaft und ihrer ...Bibliotheken weiterentwickelt worden. Im Ergebnis ist es inzwischen ein Quasi-Monopol mit allen Folgen für die Wissenschaft und ihre Bibliotheken. Die aktuellen Entwicklungen in Richtung Science Tracking vertiefen diese Monopolbildung noch weiter zu ihren Ungunsten. Der Beitrag zeichnet die Entwicklung zu einem asymmetrischen System des wissenschaftlichen Publizierens nach, analysiert die jüngsten Entwicklungen um das Datentracking über Bibliotheken und diskutiert Auswege aus der bizarren Situation des Publikationssystems.
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