TY - JOUR
T1 - Streetonomics
T2 - Quantifying culture using street names
AU - Bancilhon, Melanie
AU - Constantinides, Marios
AU - Bogucka, Edyta Paulina
AU - Aiello, Luca Maria
AU - Quercia, Daniele
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Bancilhon et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/6
Y1 - 2021/6
N2 - Quantifying a society’s value system is important because it suggests what people deeply care about—it reflects who they actually are and, more importantly, who they will like to be. This cultural quantification has been typically done by studying literary production. However, a society’s value system might well be implicitly quantified based on the decisions that people took in the past and that were mediated by what they care about. It turns out that one class of these decisions is visible in ordinary settings: it is visible in street names. We studied the names of 4,932 honorific streets in the cities of Paris, Vienna, London and New York. We chose these four cities because they were important centers of cultural influence for the Western world in the 20th century. We found that street names greatly reflect the extent to which a society is gender biased, which professions are considered elite ones, and the extent to which a city is influenced by the rest of the world. This way of quantifying a society’s value system promises to inform new methodologies in Digital Humanities; makes it possible for municipalities to reflect on their past to inform their future; and informs the design of everyday’s educational tools that promote historical awareness in a playful way.
AB - Quantifying a society’s value system is important because it suggests what people deeply care about—it reflects who they actually are and, more importantly, who they will like to be. This cultural quantification has been typically done by studying literary production. However, a society’s value system might well be implicitly quantified based on the decisions that people took in the past and that were mediated by what they care about. It turns out that one class of these decisions is visible in ordinary settings: it is visible in street names. We studied the names of 4,932 honorific streets in the cities of Paris, Vienna, London and New York. We chose these four cities because they were important centers of cultural influence for the Western world in the 20th century. We found that street names greatly reflect the extent to which a society is gender biased, which professions are considered elite ones, and the extent to which a city is influenced by the rest of the world. This way of quantifying a society’s value system promises to inform new methodologies in Digital Humanities; makes it possible for municipalities to reflect on their past to inform their future; and informs the design of everyday’s educational tools that promote historical awareness in a playful way.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85108950079&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0252869
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0252869
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85108950079
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 16
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 6 June 2021
M1 - e0252869
ER -