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Abstract
Fame and celebrity play an ever-increasing role in our culture. However, despite the cultural and economic importance of fame and its gradations, there exists no consensus method for quantifying the fame of an individual, or of comparing that of two individuals. We argue that, even if fame is difficult to measure with precision, one may develop useful metrics for fame that correlate well with intuition and that remain reasonably stable over time. Using datasets of recently deceased individuals who were highly renowned, we have evaluated several internet-based methods for quantifying fame. We find that some widely-used internet-derived metrics, such as search engine results, correlate poorly with human subject judgments of fame. However other metrics exist that agree well with human judgments and appear to offer workable, easily accessible measures of fame. Using such a metric we perform a preliminary investigation of the statistical distribution of fame, which has some of the power law character seen in other natural and social phenomena such as landslides and market crashes. In order to demonstrate how such findings can generate quantitative insight into celebrity culture, we assess some folk ideas regarding the frequency distribution and apparent clustering of celebrity deaths.
Highlights
The phenomena of fame and celebrity are increasingly important in our culture
Fame clearly exists in degrees there is no consensus on its quantitative measure: researchers who have attempted to quantify fame have relied on a variety of ad hoc measures that have not themselves been evaluated or calibrated
The survey data provides a baseline, quantitative fame score that we compare against some plausible internet or social media metrics of fame. In this way we identify metrics of fame that can be employed on a larger scale to evaluate the renown of many individuals
Summary
The phenomena of fame and celebrity are increasingly important in our culture. Fame affects the economic value of names and trademarks [3], and it aids professional advancement in a variety of fields. Several studies have attempted to correlate the fame of well known individuals with measures of their professional achievement [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11], which is measured by different tools in different fields. Fame clearly exists in degrees there is no consensus on its quantitative measure: researchers who have attempted to quantify fame have relied on a variety of ad hoc measures that have not themselves been evaluated or calibrated
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