I'm working on the formula piece. Regarding a capitalization of anecdotal value, a person, organization, brand can increase value through many positive anecdotes. A very tangible example is Eric Jackson , who you could say built his company on anecdotes (Jackson kayak... he since formed Apex Kayak). He not only had many himself, he got oit there, organized clinics around the nation and engaged with the customer community. I attended one of these in Franklin NH organized by a local dealer. He listened to his customer's stories. I heard from an instructor who was also a competition Kayaker who influenced a design feature. I ran across this post from a few days ago as one example out of a lifetime. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15boRGFJnZ/
Thinking more about this essay, which is really good, especially the equation, and thinking it's a brilliant way to craft a way to see memetic fitness if a piece of information to go through the information network (https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/seeing-like-a-network).
Some memes narrative force that makes them “stickier” in a dense environment where competition for attention is fierce, and dense networks will have breakouts. The equationcan be as a formalized measure of a piece of information’s virulence.
Yes yes yes I loved that essay of yours and flagged “cultural transmission” as a way we've been thinking along the same lines. Also the lovely network histograms! I'm a scholar of stories and not trained in the kind of tools that could map and track anecdote circulation. Somewhere else I commented today how back in the day a person would "dine out on a story," and that was the value, as a kind of social status and network lubricant. My model leans too heavily on quantifying and I would love if if you would tweak and do what you do with it. You may have been my audience all along.
Well, there's been quite a lot of work in cultural evolution and digital humanities that you should be aware of, though not so much on just what gives "memes" staying power. On that subject, you should look at Hollywood Economics, which I mentioned in my other comment. You should also look at The Best Seller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel, by Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers (2016). Jockers is an expert in digital humanities and Archer was his student at Stanford; she has a background in publishing. I'm in the process of reading it, and I'm sure it'll deliver (something), because I'm familiar with Jockers' technical work. But it's written for a general audience and so has lots of stuff I don't care about. Whatever. I'm sure we'll learn something about what best sellers have that other books don't.
You really need to look at his 2013 book, Macroanalysis. There he uses the tools of digital humanities to examine a corpus of 3000 19th century Anglophone novels (American, Irish, British). It's got amazing stuff in it. One of the things Jockers did was use a machine learning technique called topic analysis to identify 500 "themes" in the corpus, where a theme is a bunch of words that occur consistently together in a text. For each theme he lists the words associated with the theme, and their prevalence in it, has charts showing the prevalence of the theme in each of the three corpora and a graph that show how the theme develops over the course of the century.
He discusses some of the themes in the book, but he can't do them all. But he has a website and gives you access to each theme so you can examine them for yourself. And I did just that as I blogged my way through the book. You might be particularly interested in this post: Reading Macroanalysis 6.1: Theme–Dogs, Gold, Slavery, and Awakening, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-macroanalysis-61-themedogs-gold.html As you would expect, the SLAVERY theme shows a big rise in the American corpus between 1840 and 1870. The Irish corpus shows a big spike at 1860-62. I haven't got the foggiest idea what that's about. The BIBLICAL LANGUAGE theme shows a rise in America from 1820 to 1840, which is after the 2nd Awakening and before the Civil War. Are we looking at the rise of abolitionist discourse? I've collected all my posts on that book into a single document: https://www.academia.edu/8183111/Reading_Macroanalysis_Notes_on_the_Evolution_of_Nineteenth_Century_Anglo_American_Literary_Culture
As for the general ecology, I'd forwarded your tweet about this entry to four scholars of cultural evolution. You should follow their work, and perhaps contact them. I've written a little guide, A quick guide to cultural evolution for humanists, https://www.academia.edu/40930224/A_quick_guide_to_cultural_evolution_for_humanists On digital humanties, check out the Journal of Cultural Analytics, https://culturalanalytics.org/. It's relatively new. Also, Digital Humanities Quartely (DHQ), also on line. & more 'traditional.'
"Value" needs to be disambiguated here, I think. Is the goal to model "social value"? Or private value - that is, something closer to price? The power of narrative a la Schiller is, I think, something different - it is more like a propulsive force rather than an object. But an "anecdote" (story) is also a sort of conceptual "thing," and as a "thing" it is far closer to a public good than a private good. That is, its "value" - influence, perhaps - derives from its inherent shareability rather than from exchange in markets. Anecdotes in the world have an abundant character (one anecdote, touching many people) rather than a scarce character (two copies of the same anecdote, competing with each other). Once the anecdotal "thing" is reduced to something closer to a private good, via packaging (that is, materiality) and/or law (that is, copyright or something related), the economics change. In either case, there are enormous literatures on valuing public goods generally and on valuing copyrighted works specifically.
I pondered for many years the social lubricant aspect of anecdotes -- the old idea of "he dined out on that story for years" that could be quantified certainly but that kind of value wasn't really the point. In the Victorian sense it was a story about something that happened to you and the private club was the social medium of the day. So the anecdote was somewhere between a public good and a private one. I've moved far from these original ideas and I'd like to get back to them yes.
Extreme nitpick: if you want higher E and Rext values to work *against* decay, shouldn't they have negative signs (i.e. in the decay function shouldn't your exponent be -\lambda(t - E - Rext) rather than -\lambda(t + E + Rext))? Intuitively to me, t is a pro-decay force (more time = more decay) while media coverage is an anti-decay force (more coverage = less decay) so they should have opposite signs in front of them. Or am I misunderstanding something?
Very interesting. As an oblique complement to your model you might want to look at Arthur De Vany, Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry, Routledge, 2004. In that case movies are the anecdotes, they are stories, after all, and their direct economic value can be calculated at the box office. De Vany investigates a decade-long run of statistics from the 1990s. I have a review here: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2012/05/chaos-in-movie-biz-review-of-hollywood.html
From the review:
In the words of [the late] screen writer William Goldman, “nobody knows anything” about what happens to movies once they are released to the theatres. Most movies don't even break even, much less make a profit – not in theatrical release, which is what De Vany investigates. (These days, movies make money on DVDs and TV, but that's another story, told by Jay Epstein.) That's no way to run a business, but the problems are inherent in the nature of movies as a business venture. The deep and ineradicable condition of the business is that there is no reliable way to estimate the market appeal of a movie short of putting it on screens across the country and seeing if people come to watch.
Does having “bankable” names on the marquee guarantee that the movie will make bank? No. Does opening big on thousands of screens with PR from here to the moon guarantee that the movie will make bank? No. Does a small opening mean the film is doomed? No. Hence Goldman's remark.
But all is not chaos. Or rather it is, but chaos of the mathematical kind. De Vany shows that about 3 or 4 weeks into circulation, the trajectory of movie dynamics (that is, people coming to theaters to watch a movie) hits a bifurcation. Most movies enter a trajectory that leads to diminishing attendance and no profits. But a few enter a trajectory that leads to continuing attendance and, eventually, a profit. Among these, a very few become block busters.
Thinking more about the relationship between De Vany’s study and your proposal, De Vany in effect identified Core Quality Factors for movies and then asked whether or not they would allow us to predict box office success. The answer he got was, NO, we can’t do it. What were his CQFs? Who stared in the film, who wrote it, who directed it, who produced it, and maybe one or two others. He also looked at opening box office. None of those variables or combination of them would allow you to predict how the film did.
You, might object that those factors aren’t subtle or rich enough to predict how a film would do. I agree. But I’m not sure what would. Films are complex objects where details matter. Take films made from Shakespeare plays. The scripts are quality material, time-tested, etc., though a bit dated. But they’re only scripts. Actors, lighting, costumes, staging, direction, and so forth, it all makes a difference. Audiences are various; the “taste profile” of a population is messy and complex.
The same is true for poems, novels, musical compositions and performances, sculpture, for expressive culture in general. That’s how culture is.
I'm working on the formula piece. Regarding a capitalization of anecdotal value, a person, organization, brand can increase value through many positive anecdotes. A very tangible example is Eric Jackson , who you could say built his company on anecdotes (Jackson kayak... he since formed Apex Kayak). He not only had many himself, he got oit there, organized clinics around the nation and engaged with the customer community. I attended one of these in Franklin NH organized by a local dealer. He listened to his customer's stories. I heard from an instructor who was also a competition Kayaker who influenced a design feature. I ran across this post from a few days ago as one example out of a lifetime. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15boRGFJnZ/
Thinking more about this essay, which is really good, especially the equation, and thinking it's a brilliant way to craft a way to see memetic fitness if a piece of information to go through the information network (https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/seeing-like-a-network).
Some memes narrative force that makes them “stickier” in a dense environment where competition for attention is fierce, and dense networks will have breakouts. The equationcan be as a formalized measure of a piece of information’s virulence.
Yes yes yes I loved that essay of yours and flagged “cultural transmission” as a way we've been thinking along the same lines. Also the lovely network histograms! I'm a scholar of stories and not trained in the kind of tools that could map and track anecdote circulation. Somewhere else I commented today how back in the day a person would "dine out on a story," and that was the value, as a kind of social status and network lubricant. My model leans too heavily on quantifying and I would love if if you would tweak and do what you do with it. You may have been my audience all along.
Well, there's been quite a lot of work in cultural evolution and digital humanities that you should be aware of, though not so much on just what gives "memes" staying power. On that subject, you should look at Hollywood Economics, which I mentioned in my other comment. You should also look at The Best Seller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel, by Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers (2016). Jockers is an expert in digital humanities and Archer was his student at Stanford; she has a background in publishing. I'm in the process of reading it, and I'm sure it'll deliver (something), because I'm familiar with Jockers' technical work. But it's written for a general audience and so has lots of stuff I don't care about. Whatever. I'm sure we'll learn something about what best sellers have that other books don't.
You really need to look at his 2013 book, Macroanalysis. There he uses the tools of digital humanities to examine a corpus of 3000 19th century Anglophone novels (American, Irish, British). It's got amazing stuff in it. One of the things Jockers did was use a machine learning technique called topic analysis to identify 500 "themes" in the corpus, where a theme is a bunch of words that occur consistently together in a text. For each theme he lists the words associated with the theme, and their prevalence in it, has charts showing the prevalence of the theme in each of the three corpora and a graph that show how the theme develops over the course of the century.
He discusses some of the themes in the book, but he can't do them all. But he has a website and gives you access to each theme so you can examine them for yourself. And I did just that as I blogged my way through the book. You might be particularly interested in this post: Reading Macroanalysis 6.1: Theme–Dogs, Gold, Slavery, and Awakening, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-macroanalysis-61-themedogs-gold.html As you would expect, the SLAVERY theme shows a big rise in the American corpus between 1840 and 1870. The Irish corpus shows a big spike at 1860-62. I haven't got the foggiest idea what that's about. The BIBLICAL LANGUAGE theme shows a rise in America from 1820 to 1840, which is after the 2nd Awakening and before the Civil War. Are we looking at the rise of abolitionist discourse? I've collected all my posts on that book into a single document: https://www.academia.edu/8183111/Reading_Macroanalysis_Notes_on_the_Evolution_of_Nineteenth_Century_Anglo_American_Literary_Culture
As for the general ecology, I'd forwarded your tweet about this entry to four scholars of cultural evolution. You should follow their work, and perhaps contact them. I've written a little guide, A quick guide to cultural evolution for humanists, https://www.academia.edu/40930224/A_quick_guide_to_cultural_evolution_for_humanists On digital humanties, check out the Journal of Cultural Analytics, https://culturalanalytics.org/. It's relatively new. Also, Digital Humanities Quartely (DHQ), also on line. & more 'traditional.'
Is common law (precedent, stare decisis, casuistry) a system of anecdotal valuation?
Interesting! Unwritten rules allow the breakage of them to be interesting.
"Value" needs to be disambiguated here, I think. Is the goal to model "social value"? Or private value - that is, something closer to price? The power of narrative a la Schiller is, I think, something different - it is more like a propulsive force rather than an object. But an "anecdote" (story) is also a sort of conceptual "thing," and as a "thing" it is far closer to a public good than a private good. That is, its "value" - influence, perhaps - derives from its inherent shareability rather than from exchange in markets. Anecdotes in the world have an abundant character (one anecdote, touching many people) rather than a scarce character (two copies of the same anecdote, competing with each other). Once the anecdotal "thing" is reduced to something closer to a private good, via packaging (that is, materiality) and/or law (that is, copyright or something related), the economics change. In either case, there are enormous literatures on valuing public goods generally and on valuing copyrighted works specifically.
I pondered for many years the social lubricant aspect of anecdotes -- the old idea of "he dined out on that story for years" that could be quantified certainly but that kind of value wasn't really the point. In the Victorian sense it was a story about something that happened to you and the private club was the social medium of the day. So the anecdote was somewhere between a public good and a private one. I've moved far from these original ideas and I'd like to get back to them yes.
Extreme nitpick: if you want higher E and Rext values to work *against* decay, shouldn't they have negative signs (i.e. in the decay function shouldn't your exponent be -\lambda(t - E - Rext) rather than -\lambda(t + E + Rext))? Intuitively to me, t is a pro-decay force (more time = more decay) while media coverage is an anti-decay force (more coverage = less decay) so they should have opposite signs in front of them. Or am I misunderstanding something?
So interesting one of the AI models I fed the formula into said the same thing but two others said this was correct. I think you are.
Very interesting. As an oblique complement to your model you might want to look at Arthur De Vany, Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry, Routledge, 2004. In that case movies are the anecdotes, they are stories, after all, and their direct economic value can be calculated at the box office. De Vany investigates a decade-long run of statistics from the 1990s. I have a review here: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2012/05/chaos-in-movie-biz-review-of-hollywood.html
From the review:
In the words of [the late] screen writer William Goldman, “nobody knows anything” about what happens to movies once they are released to the theatres. Most movies don't even break even, much less make a profit – not in theatrical release, which is what De Vany investigates. (These days, movies make money on DVDs and TV, but that's another story, told by Jay Epstein.) That's no way to run a business, but the problems are inherent in the nature of movies as a business venture. The deep and ineradicable condition of the business is that there is no reliable way to estimate the market appeal of a movie short of putting it on screens across the country and seeing if people come to watch.
Does having “bankable” names on the marquee guarantee that the movie will make bank? No. Does opening big on thousands of screens with PR from here to the moon guarantee that the movie will make bank? No. Does a small opening mean the film is doomed? No. Hence Goldman's remark.
But all is not chaos. Or rather it is, but chaos of the mathematical kind. De Vany shows that about 3 or 4 weeks into circulation, the trajectory of movie dynamics (that is, people coming to theaters to watch a movie) hits a bifurcation. Most movies enter a trajectory that leads to diminishing attendance and no profits. But a few enter a trajectory that leads to continuing attendance and, eventually, a profit. Among these, a very few become block busters.
Yes thank you for thinking about decay function!!
Thinking more about the relationship between De Vany’s study and your proposal, De Vany in effect identified Core Quality Factors for movies and then asked whether or not they would allow us to predict box office success. The answer he got was, NO, we can’t do it. What were his CQFs? Who stared in the film, who wrote it, who directed it, who produced it, and maybe one or two others. He also looked at opening box office. None of those variables or combination of them would allow you to predict how the film did.
You, might object that those factors aren’t subtle or rich enough to predict how a film would do. I agree. But I’m not sure what would. Films are complex objects where details matter. Take films made from Shakespeare plays. The scripts are quality material, time-tested, etc., though a bit dated. But they’re only scripts. Actors, lighting, costumes, staging, direction, and so forth, it all makes a difference. Audiences are various; the “taste profile” of a population is messy and complex.
The same is true for poems, novels, musical compositions and performances, sculpture, for expressive culture in general. That’s how culture is.