2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
Film "Prisoner of the Caucasus!"
Dutch scientists in their work, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, have studied how remakes appear. It turned out that a relatively small number of stories generate the largest number of interpretations.
The authors studied over 400 versions of Little Red Riding Hood's fairy tale in their research. These interpretations were created over two centuries - the oldest fairy tale was created at the end of the 18th century, and the “youngest” - in 2015. They also reviewed more than 550 letters of happiness that appeared in the period of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Scientists have made connections between stories and letters by building a graph. This graph shows the precedence relationship, that is, what story or letter gave rise to subsequent ones. The texts most similar to each other are closer to each other.
On the right is the structure of interpretations of "Little Red Riding Hood", on the left - letters of happiness
In both charts, the dots represent stories and letters, and the lines represent relationships between them. The oldest versions are shown in black and the youngest are shown in white. Researchers have noticed that most of the lyrics are paired with texts of a similar hue, suggesting that the remakes are based on originals from around the same period. In addition, the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale graph shows that it has several key stories that function as a basis and generate a large number of retellings.
Thus, the researchers conclude that some stories will only be retelled once, while others may produce a large number of remakes - that is, a small number of originals give rise to most of the interpretations. They also say that remakes do not appear from old stories, but from those close to them in time.
In the future, researchers want to look at a different linking format, where all interpretations will be connected to each other through a small number of steps. According to the portal Arstechnica, episodes of a TV series, for example, Star Trek, can be connected with such connections.
