The Neverending Story: Cultural Evolution and Narratives
Lecture 3: Romance
What can a cultural evolution approach tell us about the genre of Romance? This lecture explores how popular romantic narratives may reflect evolved mate preferences, and how international folktales may provide evidence for the universality of romantic love. In the exercise you will learn how to use corpus analysis and text mining to examine gender representations in classic literature, and how they may have changed over time.
Resources
Slides: (pdf)
Exercise:
Instructions (pdf)
R code
Model answer (pdf)
Additional R code:
Gender_in_books.R
further_exercise_model_script.R
This project was supported by Grant #61105 from the John Templeton Foundation to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (PIs: S. Gavrilets and P. J. Richerson) with assistance from the Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity and the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
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