Pantheon: A Dataset for the Study of Global Cultural Production

Paper by Amy Zhao Yu, Shahar Ronen, Kevin Hu, Tiffany Lu, and César A. Hidalgo: “We present the Pantheon 1.0 dataset: a manually curated dataset of individuals that have transcended linguistic, temporal, and geographic boundaries. The Pantheon 1.0 dataset includes the 11,341 biographies present in more than 25 languages in Wikipedia and is enriched with: (i) manually curated demographic information (place of birth, date of birth, and gender), (ii) a cultural domain classification categorizing each biography at three levels of aggregation (i.e. Arts/Fine Arts/Painting), and (iii) measures of global visibility (fame) including the number of languages in which a biography is present in Wikipedia, the monthly page-views received by a biography (2008-2013), and a global visibility metric we name the Historical Popularity Index (HPI). We validate our measures of global visibility (HPI and Wikipedia language editions) using external measures of accomplishment in several cultural domains: Tennis, Swimming, Car Racing, and Chess. In all of these cases we find that measures of accomplishments and fame (HPI) correlate with an R2≥50, suggesting that measures of global fame are appropriate proxies for measures of accomplishment….(More)“