Cultural Evolution of the Arts
Oleg Sobchuk (Photo: MPIEA / F. Bernoully)
Arts and media have changed significantly over time. Modern movies, with their spectacular visual effects, differ greatly from the black-and-white silent films of a century ago. Contemporary video games, often strikingly realistic, have come a long way since the days of Pong and Pac-Man. Today’s novels, poems, and songs also differ considerably from their predecessors from past decades or centuries. These developments often seem random or appear to be shaped mainly by trends and individual creativity. At the same time, the question arises whether there may in fact be underlying patterns behind these changes.
The goal of the new research group Cultural Evolution of the Arts, led by Oleg Sobchuk, is to understand which general factors—such as demographic, cognitive, or geographic influences—shape the development of artistic forms. The group will rely on large-scale arts datasets, machine-learning methods, and mathematical modeling.
“My research bridges two closely related fields: cultural evolution and the computational humanities. Cultural evolution provides the mathematical tools for explaining broad patterns of change, while the computational humanities contribute the humanistic expertise and the methods needed to study the nuances of artistic data at scale. I hope that my group will bring these two approaches, and the research communities around them, into closer dialogue,” explains Sobchuk.
About Oleg Sobchuk
Oleg Sobchuk was born in Kremenets, Ukraine. He studied literature at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and later completed a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Tartu in Estonia. He was then a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (now Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany) and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany).
