Looking at how social values are represented in fairy tales can give insights about the variations in communication of values across cultures. We propose to study how values are communicated in fairy tales from Portugal, Italy and Germany using a technique called word embedding with a compass to quantify vocabulary differences and commonalities. We study how these three national traditions of fairy tales differ in their explicit references to values. To do this, we specify a list of value-charged tokens, consider their word stems and analyse the distance between these in a bespoke pre-trained Word2Vec model. We triangulate and critically discuss the validity of the resulting hypotheses emerging from this quantitative model. Our claim is that this is a reusable and reproducible method for the study of the values explicitly referenced in historical corpora. Finally, our preliminary findings hint at a shared cultural understanding and the expression of values such as Benevolence, Conformity, and Universalism across European societies, suggesting the existence of a pan-European cultural memory.

翻译：通过观察童话中社会价值观的表现方式，可以洞察不同文化在价值观传递方面的差异。我们采用词嵌入技术与价值罗盘方法，量化分析葡萄牙、意大利和德国童话在价值观词汇上的异同，研究这三个国家童话传统在显性价值观引用上的差异。为此，我们编制了具有价值导向的标记词列表，提取其词干，并运用定制的预训练Word2Vec模型分析这些词干之间的语义距离。我们对这一量化模型产生的假设进行三角互证与批判性讨论，认为这是一种可复用、可复现的，用于研究历史语料库中显性价值观的方法。初步研究结果表明，欧洲社会在仁慈、遵从、普世主义等价值观的表达上存在共同的文化认知，这暗示着泛欧文化记忆的存在。