Networked Pantheon: a Relational Database of Globally Famous People

Abstract

This article presents Networked Pantheon, a relational database of biographies of globally famous people spanning the last 5,500 years of human history. This source of information is intended to complement Pantheon 1.0 (Yu et. al. 2016), a biographical dataset that includes temporal, spatial, gender, and occupational information on 11,341 world-renowned people – defined as those who have their biographies in 25 or more Wikipedia language-versions. Networked Pantheon adds information about the biographical links between these historical figures, which was compiled from the hyperlinks between the biographies in English Wikipedia. This digital method allows technics from network analysis to be used to study the relationships between globally famous people, and thus to calculate different measures of historical centrality for individuals, cities, countries, genders, and occupations. Networked Pantheon complements the historical popularity indicators of Pantheon 1.0 with measurements of the centrality of the figures in the network of biographical references, allowing for an approximation to the information flows between different territories, genders, and occupations of famous people over time.