Peeter Tinits

I am an applied researcher in cultural evolution with a background in linguistics and cultural history. I am interested in how large scale cultural patterns can be better understood in terms of lower level processes in the population, shaped by individual preferences, demographic transitions, and social learning. I have used evolutionary approaches to study books, films, languages, and socio-technical systems.

My postdoctoral project at MPI-EVA is on the cultural evolution of books across Europe in 1450-1900. Printed books carried ideas across time and long distances shaping the fates of nations and leading up to the foundation of modern knowledge-based industrial societies. I use aggregated bibliographic data to model how exactly this took place, focussing on the diffusion of knowledge and the formation of new language communities in the context of growing popular literacy. I work to answer questions like: How did the demographic turnover of authors influence the transition away from Latin in European book printing? How did the network of cities allow for authors like Voltaire or Newton to become known across Europe?

Cultural history now meets an increased abundance of digital data that offers great opportunities for a better historical understanding. Quantitative modelling can bring with it statistical power and greater transparency in both macro-trends and the explanations behind them, if done with care. The techniques in cultural evolution help deal with selection biases, measurement errors, and different explanations making similar predictions in analyzing large datasets. I explore the possibilities to adapt these approaches for the broader community of digital humanities.

Tinits, P. (2025). Digitized Estonian Newspapers as a Research Source. (Digiteeritud Eesti ajalehed uurimisallikana.), 31 (1), 73–111.
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Kruusmaa, K., Tinits, P., Nemvalts, L. (2025). Curated Bibliographic Data: The Case of the Estonian National Bibliography. Journal of Open Humanities Data, 11 (1), 16.
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Pahker, A., Kanger, L., Tinits, P. (2024). Where is the deep sustainability turn most likely to emerge? An Industrial Modernity Index. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 201, 123227.
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Kanger, L., Tinits, P., Pahker, A., [...] (2023). Long-term country-level evidence of major but uneven ruptures in the landscape of industrial modernity. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 48.
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Tinits, P. (2023). Stratified Historical Corpus of Estonian 1800-1940. Eesti Rakenduslingvistika Ühingu aastaraamat = Estonian papers in applied linguistics, 19, 175−194.
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Kanger, L., Tinits, P., Pahker, A., [...] (2022). Deep Transitions: Towards a comprehensive framework for mapping major continuities and ruptures in industrial modernity. Global Environmental Change, 72, 102447.
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Sobchuk, O., Tinits, P. (2020). Cultural attraction in film evolution: The case of anachronies. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 20 (3-4), 218−237.
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Tinits, P., Sobchuk, O. (2020). Open-ended cumulative cultural evolution of Hollywood film crews. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 1−16.
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