Explicit References to Social Values in Fairy Tales: A Comparison between Three E uropean Cultures (2023)

Abstract: The study of social values in fairy tales opens the possibility to learn about the communication of values across space and time. We propose to study the communication of values in fairy tales from Portugal, Italy and Germany using a technique called word embedding with a compass to quantify vocabulary differences and commonalities. We study how these three national traditions of fairy tales differ in their explicit references to values. To do this, we specify a list of value-charged tokens, consider their word stems and analyse the distance between these in a bespoke pre-trained Word2Vec model. We triangulate and critically discuss the validity of the resulting hypotheses emerging from this quantitative model. Our claim is that this is a reusable and reproducible method for the study of the values explicitly referenced in historical corpora. Finally, our preliminary findings hint at a shared cultural understanding and the expression of values such as Benevolence, Conformity, and Universalism across European societies, suggesting the existence of a pan-European cultural memory.

## introduction culture is defined "as a common heritage of a set of beliefs, norms, and values" (us dhhs 2001), that influences an individual's cognition and behaviour @xcite . social values are understood as standards or criteria of the desirable, thus they guide the selection or evaluation of behaviours, policies, people, and events @xcite . building on this understanding of values as a cornerstone of culture, we turn to literature as a mirror reflecting these values across different cultural contexts in the past. developments in nlp, in particular word embeddings, have allowed for the quantitative analysis of historical corpora @xcite . with this work we want to test the limits of an approach for studying the social values present in fairy tales, one of the most widely spread forms of popular narratives and a privileged genre for the identification of patterns of cultural exchange, as they have historically migrated across different cultures and periods, creating a rich tapestry of storytelling traditions. in particular, we study the aggregated explicit tokens mapped on the values proposed by the theory of basic human values @xcite across fairy tale corpora from three different european traditionsnamely portugal, italy and germany -in order to compare the quantitative representations and analyse the emerging patterns. we do this by first finding the stemmed matches of these tokens and enriching the text with the corresponding annotation. after that we employ a word embedding with a compass @xcite and clique percolations @xcite to highlight the semantic variation between the three national corpora. a critical investigation of the results of our method finds that its results correspond to findings of previous research. we also find indications that despite the differences on the expression of values in the three compared countries, it seems that values of benevolence (quality of interpersonal relationships), conformity (respect for social norms and expectations) and universalism (protection of the welfare of people and nature) have remained consistent in fairy tales across the three national traditions, which we also view as confirmation of the validity of our approach for the study of values embedded in historical, literary corpora. ## background the study of explicit references of values in fairy tales is related to the accumulated social attitudes up to the historical period of codification of the tales. to our knowledge, no systematic research of this wide topic exists. as such, we view it as being at the crossroads between the socio-historical, literary study of fairy tales, and the psychological study of social values which is shaped by contemporary research. on the other hand, such a study at scale would not be possible without the instruments and methods of computational humanities and word embeddings in particular. ## method our study of the explicit references to values in fairy tales follows the process illustrated in figure 2. to provide an outline, it starts with the identification of tokens that represent values of interest. we group these tokens in groups that we consider to be synonyms. then, we automatically annotate all occurrences in the text of the stems representing the considered tokens. once this is done, we manually analyse the produced annotations to identify ambiguities and mistakes in our identification of tokens. the purpose of this analysis is to better understand the semantics behind their occurrences, in order to refine the selection of tokens and identify potential tokens representing multiple values. finally, we apply a static word embedding with a compass and perform critical analysis on the differences from the resulting vector spaces. fairy tales corpora. the corpus selection had several stages. first we focused on the grimms' children's and household tales, using margaret hunt's 1884 english translation. we manually selected 30 tales that span well-known and beloved stories and lesser known ones, so as to provide a comprehensive representation of the entire collection. then we selected 30 portuguese and 30 italian tales taken from two important contemporary collections to the grimms': portuguese folktales by consiglieri pedroso, translated to english in 1882 by henriqueta monteiro; and italian popular tales, collected and translated to english in 1885 by thomas frederick crane. these collections were chosen due to their cultural significance and their temporal proximity to the grimms' collection, aiming to offer a comparative perspective on 19th century fairy tales across different european cultures. ## results an important part of the results of our approach is the reflective inspection of the produced automated annotation and possible corrections for these. an overall conclusion of this process is that, expectedly, the most impactful tokens capture the values they were intended to match well. the most important token that did not correspond to our initial interpretation was "faith". we originally ascribed the label "faith" to the value of "piety," indicating religious devotion. however, a careful examination of our corpus revealed an intriguing trend. the term "faith," contrary to our initial classification, typically expressed affiliation with "loyalty," mainly as per the usage patterns in various grimm tales, particularly in "faithful johannes" (a german tale). as a consequence, we ascribe the token "faith" to the value associated to "loyalty". another token that provides an interesting example is "father," due to its potential multiple associations. on the one hand, it could represent "caring," similar to "mother," but on the other, it could be a symbol of authority @xcite . when exploring the corpora, we found that "father" was predominantly associated with "caring," with a remarkable exception in "the maiden and the fish" (portugal), where one out of four instances appeared associated with authoritative power. a third, less impactful token we considered was "patient," which was initially associated with "kindness." however, an analysis of the corpus found that its usage related exclusively to an individual receiving medical treatment, and we consequently excluded it from our analysis. figure 4 shows the references to values by countries, according to the ascribed tokens. a more detailed mapping of occurrences of tokens in particular texts is provided in figure 7 in the appendix. from the resulting comparison of clusters across corpora, noteworthy is the one defined around tokens related to "mother." as the venn diagram on figure 5 shows, while in our german and portuguese corpora it appears together with "brother", in the italian and portuguese corpora it also appears in relation to "know." only in germany does it relate to "generous." ## discussion and conclusion while the proposed approach is still in its infancy, and the emerging results would require more thorough examination, our preliminary analysis provides some concrete evidence that european values have been a long-standing element in european cultural communication through fairy tales. the corpus analysis across different cultures revealed a significant variety in the representation of values. for example, the affiliation of the token "faith" with "loyalty" rather than "piety," particularly in german culture, illustrates the role of cultural and historical contexts in shaping value representations. similarly, the differential clustering of "piety" and "empathy" in italian and portuguese tales compared to german tales further underscores the influence of religious and socio-cultural contexts in value representation. interestingly, despite these differences, the analysis revealed a strong commonality across all three cultures, pointing at the communication of european values through tales. tokens associated with benevolence, conformity, and universalism manifested frequently across fairy tales of all three countries. this finding is particularly noteworthy because it suggests a shared cultural understanding and expression of these values across european literary production, and, possibly and by extension, across european societies, thus hinting at the existence of a pan-european cultural memory. we have identified clear limitations in our approach. working at the syntactic level, both in terms of stemming and static word embeddings, limits the possibility to capture nuances, and with this some noise is introduced in the analysis. however, contrary to our expectations, our detailed analysis revealed that ambiguities are only isolated cases. this is valid to the extent that in none of these cases a token bore semantic ambiguity that was a dichotomy rather than an outlier so that it could undermine the general results. the focus on explicit references, unsurprisingly, resulted in an inability to annotate tokens such as "democracy" in the tales, as they were only implicitly referenced. therefore, exploring methods to apply semantic word embeddings to historical texts could be a potential way to address not just explicit, but also implicit references to values @xcite . while such approaches already exist @xcite , we believe further attention should be paid to the possibility that the pre-trained embeddings may introduce biases unrelated to the corpus under study. this work provides a foundational understanding of how european values are represented in literary texts and highlights the potential of computational linguistics in cultural studies. this study encourages further interdisciplinary research in the field of literary studies, cultural analytics, and computational linguistics to expand our understanding of cultural values and their historical evolution. token synonyms value dialogu conversation universalism equality equality, equal universalism free free self-direction right right, claim universalism justic justice, judge, trial, fairness, just universalism peace peace universalism cooper help, together benevolence curios curiosity, curious self-direction empathi compassion, pity conformity evid evidence universalism emancip liberty self-direction generous hospitality, goodness benevolence honest honest, confidence benevolence smart clever, cleverness, wise achievement kind kind, kindness, graciousness, gentleness conformity know know, able, knowledge achievement brother brother, sister, brotherly, sisterly benevolence love love, married, wife, husband, marriage, wedding benevolence loyal honor, faith benevolence pieti piety, pious, god, virgin, saint, angel, pray tradition mother mother, father, motherly, fatherly benevolence punish punish, punishment conformity pure pure, innocent, innocence tradition correct correct, reason, correctness universalism reward reward, prize, pay, treasure, jewels power law lawful, king, queen power solidar harmony, support benevolence toler acceptance, permissiveness universalism truth truth universalism