How do we copy and paste? The semantic drift of quotations in blogspace
Résumé
We describe reformulation processes within a large distributed system such as blogspace; showing how some specific features of public representations may be altered by bloggers when they freely reproduce them. To deal with robust and simple cultural representations, we focus on the evolution of quotations. In particular, we uncover some of the semantic and structural characteristics of individual words and the substitutions they undergo. Our work amounts to a large in vivo experiment where we appraise the impact of classically-influent psycholinguistic variables in the accuracy of the reproduction. We show that all variables remarkably exhibit a single attractor and are generally contractile. Even though the observed convergence patterns only partially explain quotation evolution, we shed light on a class of phenomena which are prone to constitute a key element of a broader empirically-grounded, attractor-based theory of cultural evolution.
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brainscopycut.pdf (1.34 Mo)
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images/substitution-chains.pdf (2.21 Ko)
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images/substitution-q_max.pdf (2.58 Ko)
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images/substitution-temporal-binning-a.pdf (2.08 Ko)
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| Origine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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| Origine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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| Origine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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