Inference method for cultural diffusion patterns using a field model

Abstract

AbstractCultural diffusion is one of the core concepts in the field of traditional cultural geography. Understanding the spatial diffusion patterns and coupling relationships of specific cultural phenomena is an effective means to explore the formation mechanism and development trend of culture. However, the quantitative analyses of cultural diffusion patterns from the perspective of classical cultural geography, particularly in the automatic detection of cultural regions and the identification of cultural diffusion types, and the internal diffusion structure of culture, are lacking. This study proposes a method called field model‐based cultural diffusion patterns (FM‐CDP). By using the point data of a cultural event, FM‐CDP can detect different levels of cultural regions, automatically identify their spatial diffusion types, and calculate the spatial diffusion relationship among cultural regions. The spatial diffusion pattern of the place names of Chinese villages was analyzed in this work to verify the effectiveness of FM‐CDP. Results showed that FM‐CDP can effectively identify existing cultural diffusion patterns from the point data of specific cultural features. This method can also be applied to the analysis of other cultural diffusion patterns that represent a certain cultural phenomenon in the form of point features.