Durkheim, 1915

Mauss, 1936

Giddens, 1984

Bourdieu, 1980

Kroeber, 1943

Dawkins, 1976

Boyd & Richerson, 1988

Ingold, 1999

Epidemiology of Representations

Sperber, 1996

1. Epidemiology of Representations

2. Citations in the blogosphere

3. Short sentences in a web experiment

4. Limits of the approach

Dawkins

meme = atom of culture

science → philosophical framework

Sperber

✓ culture is defined by such atoms

transformation ≫ replication

Modern synthesis

Cognitive representations

Culture theory

Fodor,

Tooby, Cosmides

Cultural attractors

This crisis did not develop overnight and it will not be solved overnight

Nov 13, 2008 — telegraph.co.uk

Nov 15, 2008 — bbc.co.uk

MemeTracker dataset (now Nifty)

This problem did not develop overnight and it will not be solved overnight

frequency

age of acquisition

#phonemes

#synonyms

polysemy

Leskovec et al., 2009

Simmons et al., 2011

orthographical neighbourhood density

Raw

Cleaned

Substitution model

Time: continuous / discrete

Source: all / majority

Past: all / last bin

Destination: all / exclude past

Time: continuous / discrete

Source: all / majority

Past: all / last bin

Destination: all / exclude past

9051 substitutions

in 1060 unique clusters

POS effect across all substitution models

N > V in 8/16 models

No robust insight

Susceptibility to substitution

Variation upon substitution

Susceptibility to substitution in the sentence

Variation in the sentence upon substitution

?

?

Semantics?

Word measures

1

2

Cornish, Smith, Kirby (2013): Systems from Sequences: an Iterated Learning Account of the Emergence of Systematic Structure in a Non-Linguistic Task

Claidière, Kirby, Fagot (2014): Cultural evolution of systematically structured behaviour in a non-human primate

Moussaïd, Brighton, Gaissmaier (2015): The amplification of risk in experimental diffusion chains

• 57 subjects
• ages 18-61
• 22 women, 35 men
• 50 trees filled

• 22,4% spam
• 3,5% badly positioned

⇒ 2745 sentences

⇒ 2034 good sentences

Immediately after I become president I will confront this economic challenge head-on by taking all necessary steps

immediately after I become a president I will confront this economic challenge

Immediately after I become president, I will tackle this economic challenge head-on by taking all the necessary steps

This crisis did not develop overnight and it will not be solved overnight

the crisis did not developed overnight, and it will be not solved overnight

original

This, crisis, did, not, develop, overnight, and, it, will, not, be, solved, overnight

this, crisis, did, not, develop, overnight, and, it, will, not, be, solved, overnight

this, crisis, did, not, develop, overnight, and, it, will, not, be, solved, overnight

crisi, develop, overnight, solv, overnight

tokenize

lowercase & length > 2

stopwords

stem

The crisis didn't happen today won't be solved by midnight.

crisi, happen, today, solv, midnight

d = 0,6

Variability at the leaves (per tree)

Variability at the leaves ~ root length

Variability ~ depth (per tree)

Variability ~ depth (all trees)

Transformation rate ~ depth (per length)

Length ~ depth

Transformation rate ~ depth

Cumulated transformation ~ depth (per tree)

Transformation rate ~ depth (per tree)

Transmissibility ~ depth (all trees)

Transmissibility ~ depth (per tree)

Transmissibility ~ depth (per length)

• 22,4% spam
• Reading time decided by the subjects
• Distance has some problems

Will you investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?

Will you investigate the gravest crimes of the bush administration

Don't forget to leave the door open when you leave the office

d = 1

d = 1

Will you research the worst problems of the Bush mandate, like its surveillance?

d = 1

neo-darwinian synthesis

representational cognitive sciences

culture theory

⇝

⇝

⇝

specification | realisation

⇜

⇜

⇜

FR

EN

ES

⇝

⇝

⇝

⇝

⇝

⇝

⇝

⇝

⇝

⇝

 developmental biology, evo-devo

4Es

"savoir pratique"

biology

psychology

social

Read

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Sperber, 1996

Ingold, 2001

mais être moche c'est quand même la base ahah

(twitter.com/raaannnia/status/585130263606390785)

Obama, 4/11/2008

Because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America

Wittgenstein (1953), Philosophical Investigations

Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Cheng, Kleinberg, Lee (2012): You had me at hello: How phrasing affects memorability

Cuffari, Di Paolo, De Jaegher (2014): From participatory sense-making to language: there and back again

1. Epidemiology of Representations

4. Limits of the approach

3. Short sentences in a web experiment

2. Citations in the blogosphere

Developed, but needs more experiments to fuel counterfactual discussion.

Uncovers robust patterns compatible with biased convergence on some dimensions.

Indicates transmissibility and variability rather than convergence.

(Non-formal) interpretation and semantics is a mostly unsolved problem.