Publication Details
Category Text Publication
Reference Category Journals
DOI 10.1002/pan3.10551
Licence creative commons licence
Title (Primary) The relation between biodiversity in literature and social and spatial situation of authors: Reflections on the nature–culture entanglement
Author Langer, L.; Burghardt, M.; Borgards, R.; Richter, R.; Wirth, C.
Source Titel People and Nature
Year 2024
Department CLE
Volume 6
Issue 1
Page From 54
Page To 74
Language englisch
Topic T5 Future Landscapes
Data and Software links https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2422561
https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/7POSNW
Keywords biodiversity in literature; computational literary studies; corpus study; cultural ecology; environmental humanities; nature's contribution to communication; non-material contribution; random forest analysis
Abstract
  1. Understanding the nature–culture entanglement by combining the methods of natural sciences and humanities is little approached in neither of the fields. With a specific combination of methods from both digital humanities and ecology, we aimed at identifying several of people's life circumstances that relate to their individual sensitivity towards biodiversity. The circumstances with a strong correlation could be considered and targeted by decision-makers, for example by developing specific education programmes for making people more eco-conscious or adjusting relevant regulations.
  2. We applied machine learning techniques onto a database including information about the frequency of biodiversity mentioned in creative literature (BiL) from 1705 to 1969 as response variable related to metadata about the corresponding works and their authors as predictors, including localisation, age, gender and literature genre. The algorithm determined the response's dependency on each predictor, which can be interpreted as the intensity of this particular sensitivity parameter for biodiversity, and which we also related to time.
  3. We recognised that gender, age, region and settlement size are predictors significantly correlated to BiL. Statistically, these predictors can be viewed as starting points of the eventual individual level of awareness for biodiversity. For example, authors from villages exhibit a higher BiL than those from cities, which we interpret as a signal for the dependence of awareness for biodiversity on spatial distance from nature, which in turn can be addressed in urban development.
  4. Our conclusion is that applying a machine learning technique on literary data yields meaningful results, thereby showing potential for further similar investigations and the combination of methods from natural sciences and humanities to achieve so far unattainable insights. With our study, these insights could contribute to ecologically based decision-making processes.
Persistent UFZ Identifier https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=20939&ufzPublicationIdentifier=28255
Langer, L., Burghardt, M., Borgards, R., Richter, R., Wirth, C. (2024):
The relation between biodiversity in literature and social and spatial situation of authors: Reflections on the nature–culture entanglement
People Nat. 6 (1), 54 - 74 10.1002/pan3.10551