It's out, open-access: "Cohort Succession Explains Most Change in Literary Culture"—by me, @kkiley, @ShangWenyi, and @vaiseys. This image gives you the general drift, but there are twists along the way, so 1/9! https://t.co/RhG6hJeyjs pic.twitter.com/1tdvtvdJPf
— Ted Underwood (@Ted_Underwood) May 2, 2022
Note: You should read the whole tweet stream, not just the first tweet. Underwood has another tweet stream about this article, noting "sometimes loose ends or new puzzles are more interesting to other researchers. So: short thread about those."
Abstract of the linked article: Many aspects of behavior are guided by dispositions that are relatively durable once formed. Political opinions and phonology, for instance, change largely through cohort succession. But evidence for cohort effects has been scarce in artistic and intellectual history; researchers in those fields more commonly explain change as an immediate response to recent innovations and events. We test these conflicting theories of change in a corpus of 10,830 works of fiction from 1880 to 1999 and find that slightly more than half (54.7 percent) of the variance explained by time is explained better by an author’s year of birth than by a book’s year of publication. Writing practices do change across an author’s career. But the pace of change declines steeply with age. This finding suggests that existing histories of literary culture have a large blind spot: the early experiences that form cohorts are pivotal but leave few traces in the historical record.
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The first diagram in this post is about cohort succesion: The Direction of Cultural Evolution, Macroanalysis at 3 Quarks Daily. That post is about Matthew Jockers's Macroanalysis. For further context, see mt working paper, On the Direction of Cultural Evolution: Lessons from the 19th Century Anglophone Novel, April 2015.
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