TY - JOUR
T1 - Modeling the spatial dynamics of culture spreading in the presence of cultural strongholds
AU - Lizana, George Ludvig
AU - Mitarai, Namiko
AU - Sneppen, Kim
PY - 2011/6/28
Y1 - 2011/6/28
N2 - Cultural competition has throughout our history shaped and reshaped the geography of boundaries between humans. Language and culture are intimately connected and linguists often use distinctive keywords to quantify the dynamics of information spreading in societies harboring strong culture centers. One prominent example, which is addressed here, is Kyoto's historical impact on Japanese culture. We construct a minimal model, based on shared properties of linguistic maps, to address the interplay between information flow and geography. We show that spreading of information over Japan in the premodern time can be described by an Eden growth process with noise levels corresponding to coherent spatial patches of sizes given by a single day's walk (∼15 km), and that new words appear in Kyoto at times comparable to the time between human generations (∼30 yr).
AB - Cultural competition has throughout our history shaped and reshaped the geography of boundaries between humans. Language and culture are intimately connected and linguists often use distinctive keywords to quantify the dynamics of information spreading in societies harboring strong culture centers. One prominent example, which is addressed here, is Kyoto's historical impact on Japanese culture. We construct a minimal model, based on shared properties of linguistic maps, to address the interplay between information flow and geography. We show that spreading of information over Japan in the premodern time can be described by an Eden growth process with noise levels corresponding to coherent spatial patches of sizes given by a single day's walk (∼15 km), and that new words appear in Kyoto at times comparable to the time between human generations (∼30 yr).
U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevE.83.066116
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevE.83.066116
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 21797450
SN - 1539-3755
VL - 83
SP - 066116
JO - Physical Review E (Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics)
JF - Physical Review E (Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics)
IS - 6
ER -