Comparing Symbolism Across Asian Cultural Contexts Using Graph Similarity Measures
Bruno Sartini, Valentin Vogelmann, Marieke van Erp, Aldo Gangemi · Archivio istituzionale della ricerca (Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna) · 2022
Symbols are an essential part of cultures as means to express ideas, values, traditions and as instantiations of belief systems (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952; Brislin, 1976). Unsurprisingly, thus, symbols form the basis of a variety of comparative cultural studies such as evoked concepts in jewellery and ornaments (Zavvāri* and Chitsāziyān, 2021), rituals, mottos, and icons (Manners, 2011), symbolism of trees, dragons, and tree of life (Rival, 2020; Yuan and Sun, 2021; Reno, 1977). Guided by Martinho (2018), who argues for a shift in cultural studies towards quantitative approaches, and Zepetnek (1999), who adapted comparative literature methodology to identify parallels between cultures, we propose a computational approach that uses symbols for quantified comparative cultural analyses. Leveraging information contained in HyperReal (Sartini et al., 2021), a novel database of symbolism, we define two quantitative measurements of cultural similarity which we apply to its data.