Geography relates to the Earth’s description; by comparison, then cliography is a description of history and fame. In difference to the study of history as a topic, cliography is more concerned with the ongoing dynamics, the “laws” that account for historical events and attempt to forecast future happenings.
Wikipedia puts it:
Geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks an understanding of the Earth and its human and natural complexities—not merely where objects are, but how they have changed and come to be.
Cliograms are predominantly (at the current time), but not necessarily, tree diagrams of cultural phylogeny. However, they could be represented by any other for any diagram, plot, chart, graph, or infographic that relates to the area of cliology relating to cliology.
Clioanalysis ranges from a loose, poetic description, to a systematic and tightly formulated image that conforms to a specified framework. Such analysis entails a process to depict structure, interactions, dynamics around features such as populations, dispersion, cause and effect and other properties of a system, used to forecast and intervene culturally for specific intent.
Basic cliograms
Perhaps the most useful form of cliogram comes from graph theory. These are mostly dots, and arrows, vertices and edges, that depict entities and their relationships. Computer science provides many variants that are good for highlighting salient features of a system. Tree graphs are common in evolutionary studies as they show patterns of descent, usually as an ever-branching form from some root node. However, other forms of graph might be useful where other relationships such as multiple-inheritance, or influence are important to the analysis. The construction of a phylogenetic tree of clia will be examined here as an example of what data structures and processing are involved.
The data comes from a matrix of operational taxonomic units (OTUs). The precise nature of the OTU depends on what is being charted: clia (cultural objects), or demes (populations of adherents). Two types of OTU are considered here: clia and demes, though there are likely to be more.
Clia (pl. clion) are the cultural Linnaean information objects that have been identified and named. These can be almost any aspect of culture such as artefacts, practices, policies, organisational structures, rituals, norms, taboos and so on.
Demes are what are often called a demographic. They relate to a population, but in this case, they relate to a group of individuals with a commonality, that commonality may be geographic, but it can also refer to a community of interest, or practice, or belief. such as political or religious organisations, or firms, or manufacturing sectors, or sports supporters. The term employed herein is adherents: those that adhere to some value or have adherited (as opposed to biologically inherited) some value. Notably, a deme is an a priori construction, a clustering by some set of shared traits.
Traits are properties. They are aspects of the expressed phenotype, that is, the visible features of the OTU. Here, they are the features of a clion or cultural object. A table may have four legs; a car might have a 4 cylinder engine; a religion may be monotheistic; an organisation may be centralised; a society may be democratic. An OTU might have a very large number of traits associated with it. Trait encoding is performed with respect to the presence or absence of a feature in each OTU. Given a long list of potential traits then each one is assessed for that clion, and given a binary note. Consequently, a clion will have a long binary encoded string associated with it; this is its memetic portrait.
As the value of cliography comes from comparing and contrasting clia, then a number of clia are likely to need portraying; when put together, these constitute a gallery.
Strong configuration management and version control is demanded, especially for an electronic database that is to be crowdsourced. This database is currently a work in progress and likely to be called LUCA (large unified cultural archive) after Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Semantic Versioning (SemVer) is to be applied to both the processing system and each clion, in order to track updates and changes.
[structural examples of data (a clion in clobase, 0110 etc.)]
Without going into the object-oriented or coded implementation, a structural example of a gallery would resemble a spreadsheet: traits would be the column headings; the row headings would be the names of the clia. In each intersecting cell, where a trait is denoted for each clion, then a boolean value would be inserted.
[idealised example – a classical widget model, and widget range in a market]
The classical widget provides an idealised example. In essence, it represents a spec sheet but converted into binary form. Actual encoding can be involved and is beyond the scope of this section.
[cliogram construction method – a widget trees]
Cliogram construction is performed by using a clustering algorithm. Clustering is performed by iteratively finding the closest pair of individuals or clusters. To do this, some metric is required. Hamming distance and UPGMA are simple measures, but there are more sophisticated and complex methods of performing this. The result is a hierarchy of agglomerative clusters (ie clusters of clusters, etc) which constitutes a tree structure. The tree structure can then be plotted out as a graph which depicts a cliogram of clia in the sample.
[mock up output from MENDEL]
[interpretation of widget model – needs diagram]
Types of cliogram
A cliogram is any pictorial representation that conveys cliological information. It can range from a cartoon, rich picture, or infographic, to intricate network diagrams and other computer generated graph theory images including interactive VR simulations. Currently, the most applicable type of image is that of a dendrogram, or tree: cladograms, phenograms, and phylogenetic trees, that depict the relationships between entities including similarity and descent.
There are a diverse range of what can be depicted but Aristotle’s categories and aeieta give us a view of the big groups. These can be thought of as memes in mind, matter, motion, motive etc.
- Memes in mind are the thoughts in our heads, or in repositories such as libraries or databases. They are the ideal form of the meme, the templates or blueprints that exist as words or symbols or digits or neural connections. Such ideas are expressed as other “memes in -” modes, such as matter or motion and so on, or are replicated as memes in mind in some other person or repository.
- Memes in matter would suggest a formal cause: the structure of material. These would be artefacts such as pots, arches, clothes fashions, aircraft, computers, and any other product of human invention. It is where an artificer has taken a thought or idea or blueprint and assembled matter into some object. They are the physical cultural objects that surround us.
- Memes in motion are actions, behaviours, responses. They are the performances that individuals, organisations, or machines (such as robots) enact. Such actions are often involved with building memes in matter (making things) or replicating memes in mind through communication.
- Memes in motive are a kind of memes in mind. Rather than being expressed as artefacts (the structure of matter), they are expressed as action (motion). They are the cultural values that are propagated, ideologies, money, ethics and so on, through society (or demes as called herein). These higher level epistemological memes act as the gatekeepers for more mundane memes and also serve as intentions and drivers for the expression of memes in mind into other forms.
There are likely to be others, but so far these big groups and the clustering of their elements are informative. For example, projecting memes of matter and motive would provide some forecast towards a technological trajectory and may be involved in marketing and product development, such a drug discovery.
[cliogram of clia showing cliogram of cultural objects (memes in matter)]
The most apparent cliogram would be that of memes in matter: the structural resemblances between artefacts. This would therefore be a representation of the cliomes (memeplexes) which are expressed as clions (objects of culture). If were we to consider replicating genetic code’s complex expression (as amino acids, proteins, tissue, organs and so on) as a life-form, then an organism would be genes in matter. Hence, a memes in matter cliogram is the closest to that of a biological family tree of species, Such a cliogram would depict and relate the artefacts and manufactured objects that surround us: it would contribute to a Cultural Linneanism.
Perhaps more usefu thoughl, sociologically, and commercially, are cliograms of memes in motive. A cliogram on the basis of intent would be a depiction of differences, and clusters of similirity, of interests among a population. It could, for example, present a map of political or religious diversity, and would have demographic application. Cliology has taken the word “deme” from biology, and adapted it to mean a subset of a population that adheres to (or has adherited, or been infected with) an ideological memeplex. A cliogram of memes in motive, where motive loosly referrs to values, attitudes, preferences, and so on, thereby would be a cliogram of demes: a demographic! Tribal marketing, a form of segmentation, is a way of aprehending brand allegence and usually partitions consumers into ad hoc clusters. It provides a picture of who is motivated to buy what, and therefore how to communicate with them. A cliogram of demes (memes in motive) might serve a similar application, however, the base data and anlalysis would be more rigorous.
Trellis
In an ornamental garden, a trellis supports trees, usually as a kind of doorway with a tree growing each side and with their smaller branches entwining overhead. Where two dendrograms (eg. phenograms) are to be compared then they form a “trellis” which can determine the structural similarity, or distance, between the two trees, or can form a kind of matrix where the relationship between any branch of one tree and any branch of the other can be considered.
A comparative trellis that shows the distance between two trees has been employed in comparing a phenetic reconstruction of religious organisational forms (according to their portraits), with a historical phylogeny of descent. The degree of similarity shows that their traits are likely to have arisen according to descent, thereby suggesting a mechanism of inheritance in organisations.
[diag comparative trellis of organisations]
The matrix trellis gives a relationship between branches. An example might be pertinent to marketing whereby market segments (demes) are weighed against products (memes). In each cell would be some measure of applicability of a product to a market, and this might be represented visually by a bump map or heat map. Such a trellis would not only depict the current market climate but in spotting eka-demes and eka-memes, yield the ability to forecast how emerging markets and products may match.
[diag matrix trellis of memes-demes]
Decimalisation
The Dewey decimal system is used for cataloguing items in a library, according to subject, for easy reference in a range of 000-999, with some decimal places. Given a phenogram (or other tree) a cultural item, or class of items can be arranged according to where it sits in the tree. A 2D vector is proposed in the range 0 to 1, whereby the first axis is the rank and the second axis is the taxon. Obviously, this would require many decimal places, but should be able to enumerate the whole of cultural diversity. This system fits in with the idea of numerical taxonomy (phenetics) and will be elaborated in another section.