Catching the Red Priest: Using Historical Editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica to Track the Evolution of Reputations

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using the chronology of changes in historical editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB) to track the changes in the landscape of cultural knowledge, and specifically, the rise and fall in reputations of historical figures. We describe the dataprocessing pipeline we developed in order to identify the matching articles about historical figures in Wikipedia, the current electronic edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (edition 15), and several digitized historical editions, namely, editions 3, 9, 11. We evaluate our results on the tasks of article segmentation and cross-edition matching using a manually annotated subset of 1000 articles from each edition. As a case study for the validity of discovered trends, we use the Wikipedia category of 18th century classical composers. We demonstrate that our data-driven method allows us to identify cases where a historical figure’s reputation experiences a drastic fall or a dramatic recovery which would allow scholars to further investigate previously overlooked instances of such change.