Almost one year ago, we published a paper in which we described a large scale analysis of cultural/literary trends, realised using the google books ngram corpus. In particular, we showed that, trough a relatively simple extraction of emotion-realted words (words semantically related to “main” emotions like joy, sadness, anger, etc.), it was possible to detect some clear tendencies, such as a general decline in the emotional “tone” of books published in the twentieth century – or at least in the frequencies of emotions words -, a divergence between American and British English – with the former being more emotional -, and, finally, the existence of distinct periods of “literary mood” in the last century.
Related to the last point, PLOS ONE just published a follow up of this research, in which we correlate this literary mood with the past century economic trend. The image below shows the main point of our study.
The red line is what we called “Literary Misery Index” (how “sad” are books in a certain year, on average), that we extracted from the books in the Google Corpus, while the black line is a 11-years moving average of the economic Misery index (how “bad” is economy in a certain year), a well-known economic index, realised adding inflation and unemployment rates. The two trends are strongly correlated (you can read more in the Bristol University press release here, and, of course, in the original paper).
As for the previous work, we are glad we had some media attention (see for example The New York Times and The Guardian), which generated quite a lot of buzz. Not surprisingly, this included some criticism. It is interesting that, while some commenters think that we are “stating the obvious”, others accuse us to apply a “crude” causal determinism, and to defend the implausible claim that economy “dictates” literature and culture.
To me, I am more sympathetic to the state-the-obvious side of the debate so I am not going to write on this (but: we are able to substantiate an “obvious” claim – economic conditions influence cultural mood – with empirical data, as well as provide some refinement, for example providing a possible estimate of a time lag). Regarding the other side of the debate, I would not say that economy “dictates” literature, but it is quite plausible that economic conditions may have an effect on mood. This is not just common sense: many studies link, for example, financial strain and depressive symptoms (here), or general psychological distress (here). If the google corpus is a good barometer of a culture mood, our results are not particularly surprising. This does not mean of course that all books published, for example, in the 80s, were gloomy (I feel like I am underestimating the intelligence of the readers, but some journalists seem to criticise our result on this shaky basis), or that economy alone has a causal effect on literature or culture.
On a related note, given that I can safely assume that most of the “crude determinism” critics come from literary, or, in general humanistic, departments: I like to imagine that a well-known German philosopher, that once was very praised in there, would be very supportive of our work!
Reference
Bentley R.A., Acerbi A., Ormerod P., Lampos V., (2014), Books Average Previous Decade of Economic Misery, PLoS ONE, 9 (1): e83147.
Alberto Acerbi (old website) 