Oleg Sobchuk 🇺🇦

@sobchuk.bsky.social

1924 Followers 953 Following

I use big data to research the cultural evolution of arts @ Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics More: https://www.aesthetics.mpg.de/institut/mitarbeiterinnen/oleg-sobchuk.html

Job announcement of two positions at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt: postdoc (Macroevolution of European Literature) and PhD student (Computational Literary Studies). Successful candidates will be affiliated with the research group Cultural Evolution of the Arts.
Door name plate with the name of my research group: Cultural Evolution of the Arts
Happy me in front of the MPI for Empirical Aesthetics
The building of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt
Fake Steven Pinker, drawn by an unknown AI model
Temporal distribution of books in the corpus
Front cover of the Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution
Sobchuk O. & Beheim B. (2025) "Does literature evolve one funeral at a time?" Proceedings B.
Several previous studies on this topic
The decomposition plot
The historical trajectories of three LDA topics in literature
Two possible scenarios of why authors change the topics of their books: due to a disruptive event (e.g., war) or due to demographic turnover
Two quantum states of Max Planck
a schematic depiction of a trend line and several causal forces that give it its shape
A visual representation of Elon Musk's ambitions to become Hitler
A screenshot of author contributions section from a random single-authored paper
A title and the [lack of] abstract for the article "Bacterial DNA in Clarkia fossils" by Arend Sidow, Allan C. Wilson and Svante Pääbo
A screenshot from the article
What we bought for your donations: medical supplies, drones, and even a car
Front page of this paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07546-2
A: Density curves of the relationship between year of release and songs’ success in 100 random genres and in the samples from the mixed-genre dataset. B: Blue dots: the relationship between time and total playcount for each of the 10 preregistered genres. Yellow distributions: the same relationships, but for the samples drawn from the mixed-genre corpus of songs (1000 samples per each actual genre). Panel C shows the same, but for 100 randomly picked genres. On panels B and C, full circles (●) on y-axis mean that the first-mover hypothesis is confirmed, empty circles (∘)—that it is not
Our approach to debiasing music data: comparing actual genres to mixed-genre samples. The figure shows several plots illustrating how it's done.
A: Density curves showing the sizes of genre populations in three datasets used in our analysis. While the median population size of our 10 preregistered genres is somewhat larger (144 artists per genre), the median population of genre sizes in the random sample of 100 genres (77 artists) is almost the same as the median across all the genres on Every Noise at Once (80 artists). B: Adoption curves of 100 random music genres. C: Adoption curves of 10 preregistered music genres
Screenshot of https://everynoise.com/
Lil Peep, photo from: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/lil-peep-cause-of-death-revealed-202399/
Abstract of the paper "First-mover advantage in music": Why do some songs and musicians become successful while others do not? We show that one of the reasons may be the “first-mover advantage”: artists that stand at the foundation of new music genres tend to be more successful than those who join these genres later on. To test this hypothesis, we have analyzed a massive dataset of over 920,000 songs, including 110 music genres: 10 chosen intentionally and preregistered, and 100 chosen randomly. For this, we collected the data from two music services: Spotify, which provides detailed information about songs’ success (the precise number of times each song was listened to), and Every Noise at Once, which provides detailed genre tags for musicians. 91 genres, out of 110, show the first-mover advantage—clearly suggesting that it is an important mechanism in music success and evolution.
Abstract of the paper
Poster for my talk at Potsdam University. Title: The Driving Forces of Literary Evolution. April 2, 6:30 pm.
Bald anti-heroes of world cine,a
A bench colored as German flag
Figure 2 from Gao & Newberry 2024
Cthulhu image from https://lovecraft.fandom.com/de/wiki/Cthulhu
This was bought for the donations in the past: 2 Starlink terminals, a drone, 2 night vision devices, 2 Motorola radios, many medical supplies
A photo of Kremenets from above. By A. Lukashchuk, Wikimedia Commons.
A plot showing prestige (impact factor) on vertical axis and fees charged by journals on horizontal axis.
A little silhouetto of a man, talking about science #1
Photo of Richard McElreath plenary at the CHR conference
German National library in Leipzig
A meme showing a bunch of orcs from Lord of the Rings, and words "ORCID"
Bret Beheim is presenting the work on modeling demographic processes in arts & culture
Mason Youngblood & Ted Underwood are drawing on the board
An example of several bluesky lists
Me next to a mural with Slavoj Žižek’s face in Ljubljana