Looking at how social values are represented in fairy tales can give insights about the variations in communication of values across cultures. We 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 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 the studied cultures, suggesting the potential existence of a pan-European cultural memory.

翻译：研究社会价值观在童话中的呈现方式，可以揭示不同文化在价值观传达上的差异。本文采用一种名为"带指南针的词嵌入"技术，通过量化词汇差异与共性，研究葡萄牙、意大利和德国童话中价值观的传达方式。我们比较了这三种民族传统在价值观明确提及方面的差异。为此，我们制定了一份具有价值倾向的词汇清单，考虑其词干，并分析这些词汇在专门预训练的Word2Vec模型中的距离。我们以三角验证方法批判性讨论该定量模型所生成假设的有效性。我们主张这是一种可复用、可重现的方法，适用于研究历史语料中明确引用的价值观。初步研究结果表明，在研究对象文化中存在着共享的文化认知，以及对仁慈、遵从和普世主义等价值观的共同表达，这暗示着可能存在泛欧洲文化记忆。