Whether books are filled with living beings depends on authors’ living situation.
(Jevjenijs / Adobe Stock – Generated with AI)

By Lars Langer, Manuel Burghardt, Roland Borgards, Ronny Richter, and Christian Wirth.

Read the full paper here.

The development and prosperity of nature and culture are intertwined. With methods from the humanities, computational sciences and ecology, our study helps people understand this entanglement by comparing (a) the relationship between authors and their life circumstances shaping their situated knowledge with (b) the relationship between living nature and literary works as an important example for cultural products. We aim to identify circumstances of authors’ situations that we can relate to their sensitivity towards biodiversity. Those circumstances with strong correlations could be considered and targeted by decision makers. For example, leaders might develop specific education programmes to make people more eco-conscious.

Our method relies on a machine learning technique that we applied to a database containing measures of biodiversity of written works between 1705 and 1969 combined with the life circumstances of the corresponding authors. Thereby, we created a model that allowed us to calculate the individual dependence of biodiversity on specific circumstances, while accounting for the influence of the remaining circumstances within the model. Our results show age, gender and geographical situation are strongly correlated with biodiversity in the respective author’s works. For example, authors from villages exhibit a higher biodiversity in literature 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.

Our results are temporally robust, suggesting the generalisable aspects of our findings. The unique combination of methods and data yielded meaningful results, indicating the potential for similar investigations for gaining so far unattainable insights. We hope that this study may be used for ecologically based decision making.