Quantifying Cultural Histories via Person Networks in Wikipedia

Abstract: At least since Priestley's 1765 Chart of Biography, large numbers of individual person records have been used to illustrate aggregate patterns of cultural history. Wikidata, the structured database sister of Wikipedia, currently contains about 2.7 million explicit person records, across all language versions of the encyclopedia. These individuals, notable according to Wikipedia editing criteria, are connected via millions of hyperlinks between their respective Wikipedia articles. This situation provides us with the chance to go beyond the illustration of an idiosyncratic subset of individuals, as in the case of Priestly. In this work we summarize the overlap of nationalities and occupations, based on their co-occurrence in Wikidata individuals. We construct networks of co-occurring nationalities and occupations, provide insights into their respective community structure, and apply the results to select and color chronologically structured subsets of a large network of individuals, connected by Wikipedia hyperlinks. While the imagined communities of nationality are much more discrete in terms of co-occurrence than occupations, our quantifications reveal the existing overlap of nationality as much less clear-cut than in case of occupational domains. Our work contributes to a growing body of research using biographies of notable persons to analyze cultural processes.