Architectural culture is a distinct form of culture [1], characterized by the material and spiritual wealth accumulated and created during a region's social and historical development. It often emerges within a unique historical context and stage, reflecting the cultural identity of that particular area. As society continues to evolve and urbanization accelerates, there has been an increasing focus on studying regional architectural heritage.
Scholars' research on architectural culture in different regions has gone through both vertical and horizontal development processes. Horizontally, it focuses on the study of architecture and urban ontology, including the functional, spatial, material and technical forms of architecture or city. Scholars such as Zhao PH et al. used mapping records, image and data collection, and field surveys to study the morphological characteristics of traditional dwellings in Shaanxi Province, China [2]. Zhang Y analyzed the characteristics of the streets and Liyuan buildings in Qingdao historical and cultural blocks, and provided model language support for the organic renewal of historical and cultural blocks [3]. Tang B et al. extracted and analyzed the symbolic features from the aspects of external form symbols, plane space symbols and indicative symbols to explore the symbolic connotation and symbol culture of Miao architecture [4]. Vertically, it emphasizes the analysis of cultural phenomena such as the dissemination [5], exchange [6], evolution [7] and change [8] of architectural culture in different regions. Hou XN et al. analyzed the interaction between Chinese arcade building and Lingnan region, society, technology and culture, as well as the ecological characteristics, orientation characteristics, stage characteristics and hierarchical characteristics [9]. Zhang RM et al. investigated the origins and cultural changes of the architectural heritage of Chinese Bai dwellings [10–11]. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive analysis and research on the spatial and temporal characteristics of architectural culture from multiple dimensions [12].
With the continuous development of digital technology [13], the expression of cultural characteristics of architectural heritage has also entered the digital era, which is no longer difficult for the collection of multiple architectural and cultural information. The visualization of architectural heritage research content through digital means allows for a better visual understanding of a region's unique architecture and urban culture. Due to the greater diversity of information obtained, the data in our study also tends to incorporate multifaceted data from text, images, and audio-visuals, which ensures and supports the effective quantification of architectural culture. Cultural computing is the field of application of computers and computing technologies for cultural preservation, recovery, storage, modelling, reproduction, presentation and dissemination [14]. Japanese researcher Tosa formalised the concept of cultural computing in 2005. He pointed out that an important aspect of cultural computing [15–16] is to reveal the evolutionary characteristics and exploration of the laws of cultural change, development, etc., which is the key issue of cultural quantification, and that the digital construction of culture requires the construction of a complete set of cultural computing methodology system [17]. However, the system is still in its infancy.
With the rapid development of computer technology, the application of computer technology in cultural studies has provided scholars with new perspectives and methods, and although there has also been some success in quantitative analysis of culture, a more nuanced perspective is still lacking. British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins defines a meme as "the smallest unit of cultural transmission in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, analogous to a gene in biology, which is naturally selected for by virtue of the effect of its expression on its own survival and reproduction in a cultural environment [18–19]". At the same time the host of the meme tends to reorganise or mutate the representation of the message when replicating and transmitting the meme [20]. The concept of meme provides a unit of culture that can be shared and transmitted across time, allowing cultural quantification to take place in a fine-grained manner. This study takes the cultural meme of architectural heritage as an entry point to achieve a quantitative analysis of the cultural evolution of urban architecture with the help of the technical method of cultural computing.
The concept of social networks originated with anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown's focus on structure [21]. This concept was initially aimed at explaining the corresponding behaviour of actors by analysing traditional small-group relationships (e.g. kinship, neighbourhood, classmates), and has since been endorsed and progressively refined by sociologists in related fields [22–23]. The founding of the International Society for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) in 1977 marked the formal birth of the social network analysis paradigm [24]. Subsequently, various social network analysis tools have emerged, such as Gephi, Ucinet [25], Pajek [26] and so on. The field of application of social networks has also expanded in recent years. Zhu XH et al. assess the network connection strength and spatial structure characteristics of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei(BTH) city cluster as an example and provide practical suggestions for the optimisation of BTH city cluster [27]. Xiang HW et al. conducted a comprehensive study of the architectural, spiritual and clan networks of the Tunpu community with a history of multiple migrations and a special cultural background, located in Guizhou Province, southwestern China [28]. Nowadays, the development and application of digital technologies, such as social networks, provide new methods for multidimensional analyses of urban architectural heritage and new possibilities for efficiently calculating the architectural culture of cities.
However, social network analysis performs well in measuring the strength of relationships and connections between different nodes in the network, but has some limitations in reflecting the spatial properties of the network. To overcome these limitations, this study approaches the research question by combining social network analysis with ArcGIS-supported network analysis [29–30] to integrate multidimensional regional architectural and cultural features and to construct relationships between multiple architectural heritages in order to understand the structural features of regional architectural culture. Unlike previous studies that only focus on spatio-temporal characteristics horizontally and on a single research object, this study fully considers the diversity of architectural and cultural characteristics from the perspective of cultural meme, and provides a new approach to the study of regional architectural culture. Therefore, this paper takes the cultural models extracted from urban architectural heritage as the research object, and combines quantitative methods with social network analysis [31] to discuss the similarities and differences in the cultural heritage of urban architecture in different periods according to the research framework in Fig. 1, and to discover the architectural and cultural characteristics of the city from a more detailed perspective.