Как измерить культурный код? Количественный анализ семантики в сказках А.С. Пушкина и в ценностях российской молодежи

Abstract

To formalize the concept of cultural code means to isolate quantitative parameters available for precise measurement, comparison
in different cultures and long-term observation. This task has not yet been fully solved. In particular, there are no tools to quantify
the possible influence of mass culture works on the cultural code, although the fact of such influence is not questioned. This paper
studies the texts of Pushkin’s fairy tales as examples of mass and well-known works for representatives of the cultural community
of Russian language native speakers$; compares the meanings contained in fairy tales with the meanings of values of Russian
schoolchildren and students, verbalized in the form of free associations with “something most important in life”. For quantitative
analysis, an automated algorithm to covert the text into a vector with the frequencies of the semantic groups of the Roget’s
Thesaurus was used. The overall semantic proximity of fairy tales to the values of young people was less than the proximity of fairy
tales to each other. The five most significant meanings in common between fairy tales and values can be conventionally designated
with the words Love, Pleasure, Mankind, Existence, and Consanguinity. Overall, the methodology presented in the paper allows for
automatic quantitative comparison of meanings in given literary works and in given target groups, and can be applied for further
research on the cultural code.