  Quantifying a society's value system is important because it suggests what
people deeply care about -- it reflects who they actually are and, more
importantly, who they will like to be. This cultural quantification has been
typically done by studying literary production. However, a society's value
system might well be implicitly quantified based on the decisions that people
took in the past and that were mediated by what they care about. It turns out
that one class of these decisions is visible in ordinary settings: it is
visible in street names. We studied the names of 4,932 honorific streets in the
cities of Paris, Vienna, London and New York. We chose these four cities
because they were important centers of cultural influence for the Western world
in the 20th century. We found that street names greatly reflect the extent to
which a society is gender biased, which professions are considered elite ones,
and the extent to which a city is influenced by the rest of the world. This way
of quantifying a society's value system promises to inform new methodologies in
Digital Humanities; makes it possible for municipalities to reflect on their
past to inform their future; and informs the design of everyday's educational
tools that promote historical awareness in a playful way.
