publications

2023

1. In Prep

   The shape of history: Quanfying dynamics of pre-modern civilizations using Wikipedia & Wikidata

   Charles Dampierre, Valentin Thouzeau, and Nicolas Baumard

   2023

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   Despite significant progress, the dynamics of pre-modern civilizations over time remain difficult to study: proper economic data (agricultural and industrial production, wages) are scarce, estimates of urbanization or population remain very uncertain, and the existence of quantifiable markers of development such as coins, shipwreck and books is limited to the most developed periods. In this article we propose another approach based on cultural productions (e.g. epics, treatises, novels). Because cultural productions require time, energy, resources, and human capital on the part of both creators and their audiences, they indirectly reflect a wide range of economic and social processes.. Here, we use large scale collaborative platforms (e.g. wiki) to build estimates of cultural production in history. We first demonstrated that the evolution of this estimates correlates with existing assessments of economic development (urbanization, population density, GDP per capita), and that it is in line with qualitative assessments of well-known golden ages (e.g, Classical Greece, Abbasid Caliphate, Tang Dynasty) as well as with important geographical shifts in history (e.g., East to West in Antiquity, West to East in Japan, North to South in China). Controlling for a range of biases, we then show that this method allows us to have a much more fine-grained representation of the dynamics of pre-modern civilizations. Finally, we show that this method can provides new insights about four historical debates: the collapse of ancient civilizations (i.e. Classical Greece, Rome, the Arab world), the little and great divergences (i.e. between Southern and Northern Europe, China and Japan, the West and the Rest), the quantitative estimation of economic development in pre-industrial periods, and the role of culture and religion in the dynamics of civilizations.

2021

1. PsyArxiv

   Exploratory preferences explain the cultural success of imaginary worlds in modern societies

   Edgar Dubourg, Valentin Thouzeau, Charles de Dampierre, and 1 more author

   Feb 2021

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   Imaginary worlds are one of the hallmarks of modern culture. They are present in many of the most successful fictions, be it in novels (e.g., Harry Potter), films (e.g., Star Wars), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda), graphic novels (e.g., One piece) and TV series (e.g., Game of Thrones). This phenomenon is global (e.g., the worldwide success of Lord of the Ring, the emergence of xuanhuan and xanxia genres in China), and massive: people spend an increasing amount of time, energy and resources involved in fictions with imaginary worlds. Why so much attention devoted to nonexistent worlds? In this paper, we propose that imaginary worlds co-opt exploratory preferences, a set of cognitive preferences that have evolved in humans and non-human animals to motivate individuals to explore new sources of reward. Imaginary worlds are fictional superstimuli that tap into the human’s interest for unfamiliar and potentially rewarding environments. This theory predicts that 1) fictions with imaginary worlds should be more appealing for individuals higher in Openness to experience (because this personality trait is associated with exploratory preferences), 2) such fictions should be more attractive for younger people (because young people reap more rewards from exploratory behaviors) and 3) such fictions should be more successful in more economically developed societies (because affluent ecologies lower the costs of exploration). We successively test these predictions with two large cultural datasets, namely IMDb (N=85,855 films) and Wikidata (N=96,711 novels), as well the Movie Personality Dataset, which aggregates averaged personality traits and demographic data from the Facebook myPersonality Database (N=3.5 million), the films they like on Facebook and metadata for films from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). We provide evidence that the appeal for imaginary worlds relies on our exploratory psychology.

2. In Prep

   Contribution of a research team (médialab-CEE-LISIS) to the Report on the fight against racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia 2020 of the French Human Right Institute

   Charles Dampierre, Andrei Mogoutov, Benjamin Tainturier, and 4 more authors

   Feb 2021

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