Cultural evolution in Vietnam's early 20th century: a Bayesian networks analysis of Franco-Chinese house designs

The study of cultural evolution has taken on an increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse approach in explicating phenomena of cultural transmission and adoptions. Inspired by this computational movement, this study uses Bayesian networks analysis, combining both the frequentist and the Hamiltonian...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2019-03
Main Authors: Quan-Hoang Vuong, Bui, Quang-Khiem, Viet-Phuong La, Thu-Trang Vuong, Ho, Manh-Toan, Nguyen, Hong-Kong T, Hong-Ngoc Nguyen, Nghiem, Kien-Cuong P, Manh-Tung Ho
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
20th century
Architecture
Bayesian analysis
Buddhism
Computer simulation
Dependence
Evolution
Markov chains
Networks
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The study of cultural evolution has taken on an increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse approach in explicating phenomena of cultural transmission and adoptions. Inspired by this computational movement, this study uses Bayesian networks analysis, combining both the frequentist and the Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach, to investigate the highly representative elements in the cultural evolution of a Vietnamese city's architecture in the early 20th century. With a focus on the façade design of 68 old houses in Hanoi's Old Quarter (based on 78 data lines extracted from 248 photos), the study argues that it is plausible to look at the aesthetics, architecture and designs of the house façade to find traces of cultural evolution in Vietnam, which went through more than six decades of French colonization and centuries of sociocultural influence from China. The in-depth technical analysis, though refuting the presumed model on the probabilistic dependency among the variables, yields several results, the most notable of which is the strong influence of Buddhism over the decorations of the house façade. Particularly, in the top 5 networks with the best Bayesian Information criterion (BIC) scores and p
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1903.00817