Folgert Karsdorp

Folgert Karsdorp · computational cultural evolution

Fragments of Cultural Change.

Each lit page is a publication. Hover to find one, click to take it out.Each lit page is a publication. Tap one to find it.

Read on
Pen sketch of Folgert Karsdorp

I’m a researcher and head of the Ethnology, Everyday Culture & Society (EECS) department at the Meertens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Computational Methods for the Study of Cultural Change at Utrecht University. My research addresses questions about how culture spreads, develops, and disappears, drawing on computational and quantitative methods from ecology, population genetics, and machine learning, with particular attention to methodological challenges in analyzing biased historical collections and measuring cultural diversity and loss.

A vibecoded playground

Games, maps and tools I vibecoded out of cultural heritage collections. Every tale, motif, card and song book you meet in them is a real record from the archive.

A hand-drawn field map with a village, a church, woods and a doctor in a gig, with the title Sagenland. Game · 12 days · Volksverhalenbank Sagenland Twelve days in the field, and what the archive kept Cycle the villages of a region that has been telling itself stories for eight years before you arrive. Visit tellers, follow tips, and race the clock: every tale in the game is a real record from the Dutch Folktale Database. Set out Little Red Riding Hood, her grandmother and the rest of the cast in a forest clearing at dusk, among drifting golden motes. Game · 427 tellings · 1781–2015 Roodkapje The Forest of Tellings Walk the forest as Little Red Riding Hood. Every fork in the path is a variant attested in 427 Dutch tellings, from 1781 to 2015, and the real words of those books keep you company along the way. Begin the tale The reading room of the Centraal Sagenarchief by lamplight, with card cabinets, a long-case clock and the window onto the canal. Puzzle game · 120 nights · Volksverhalenbank Nachtdienst Night duty in the Centraal Sagenarchief, 1983 The collector has gone home and left a note on the reading table: twelve envelopes to file before midnight, and cabinet five stays shut. Every puzzle is built from the 9,659 stories of the Dutch Folktale Database. Start your shift Gerrit de Broen’s engraved map of Amsterdam, with red and blue song books stacked on the printers’ shops. Map & street · Dutch Song Database Op ’t Water Amsterdam’s song-book trade, 1600–1700 Every song book in the Dutch Song Database that names an Amsterdam printer, placed at the address in its imprint on Gerrit de Broen’s engraved map. Then step down onto the quay where the trade was busiest. Open the map Spindle’s papercut atlas: a parchment world map dotted with red discs for the peoples and places Thompson’s sources cite, largest for India, Ireland and Iceland. Search engine · 46,000 motifs · Motif-Index Spindle Thompson’s Motif-Index, searched by meaning Describe a story element in your own words, say a sorcerer whose death is hidden in an egg, and find its motif among the 46,000 of Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, however he worded it. A papercut atlas shows where each one is told, and it all runs in your browser. Find a motif

Fragments

Notebooks on counting what the record leaves out: unseen species models, coverage, and the biases of the archives we inherit.

  1. Two ends of a folktale archive: Sagenland and Nachtdienst Two browser games built from the Dutch Folktale Database: collect legends in the field in Sagenland, then file them at the archive by night in Nachtdienst. Interactive
  2. Comparing diversity under collection bias An interactive companion to our Royal Society Interface paper on collection bias: set up two assemblages, bias how their records were collected, and see which standardization strategy still recovers the true diversity ratio. Interactive
  3. What Shall We Do with the Unseen Sailor? Applies unseen species models to VOC historical records to estimate the true number of sailors missing from the archive. 8 min read
  4. Estimating Unseen Shared Cultural Diversity Extends unseen species models to estimate the shared diversity between two cultural collections — how many artefacts they have in common that neither has observed. 11 min read
  5. Population Size Estimation as a Regression Problem Reframes population size estimation as a Bayesian regression problem to correct for heterogeneous detection probabilities in cultural samples. 12 min read
All fragments