he Similarity of Human Interest Amongst the Nations

Abstract: Are Australians more like Americans, British, New Zealanders or Indonesians? What shapes human interests more: contemporary events or events from long ago? This talk aims to answer these questions with a novel data source and new statistical technologies. Whilst several attempts have been made to get at cultural similarity amongst peoples of Earth, thus far all have relied on survey data. In contrast, we take a 'big data' approach to the question and utilise Google Trends data -- aggregate search volume data by Google across 38 nations -- to construct a model of the similarity of human interest amongst nations. We use this model to produce synthetic similarities for out of sample ties enabling a hierarchical interest similarity presentation of the major and minor divisions in international human interest.