The quantitative measure and statistical distribution of fame

TL;DR

This paper develops and evaluates internet-based metrics for quantifying fame, finding some metrics align well with human judgments and revealing that fame distribution may follow a power law similar to other social phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a practical fame metric based on internet data that correlates with human perception and explores the statistical distribution of fame.

Findings

Certain internet metrics correlate well with human judgments of fame.

Fame distribution exhibits power law characteristics.

Some folk ideas about celebrity death clustering are supported.

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.