  Looking at how social values are represented in fairy tales can give insights
about the variations in communication of values across cultures. We study how
values are communicated in fairy tales from Portugal, Italy and Germany using a
technique called word embedding with a compass to quantify vocabulary
differences and commonalities. We study how these three national traditions
differ in their explicit references to values. To do this, we specify a list of
value-charged tokens, consider their word stems and analyse the distance
between these in a bespoke pre-trained Word2Vec model. We triangulate and
critically discuss the validity of the resulting hypotheses emerging from this
quantitative model. Our claim is that this is a reusable and reproducible
method for the study of the values explicitly referenced in historical corpora.
Finally, our preliminary findings hint at a shared cultural understanding and
the expression of values such as Benevolence, Conformity, and Universalism
across the studied cultures, suggesting the potential existence of a
pan-European cultural memory.
