Fame and Ultrafame: Measuring and comparing daily levels of `being talked about' for United States' presidents, their rivals, God, countries, and K-pop
Peter Sheridan Dodds, Joshua R. Minot, Michael V. Arnold, Thayer, Alshaabi, Jane Lydia Adams, David Rushing Dewhurst, Andrew J. Reagan, and, Christopher M. Danforth

TL;DR
This study measures and compares the daily 'fame' levels of US presidents, candidates, and global entities like BTS on Twitter, revealing patterns of ultrafame and the rise of K-pop's influence.
Contribution
It introduces a lexical fame metric based on Twitter mentions and ranks, analyzing the dynamics of fame for political figures and K-pop, and compares their ultrafame levels over time.
Findings
All five political figures reached 'lexical ultrafame' with ranks around 300 or less.
Trump has maintained enduring ultrafame since 2016.
BTS's Twitter presence rivals that of major political figures, indicating K-pop's growing influence.
Abstract
When building a global brand of any kind -- a political actor, clothing style, or belief system -- developing widespread awareness is a primary goal. Short of knowing any of the stories or products of a brand, being talked about in whatever fashion -- raw fame -- is, as Oscar Wilde would have it, better than not being talked about at all. Here, we measure, examine, and contrast the day-to-day raw fame dynamics on Twitter for US Presidents and major US Presidential candidates from 2008 to 2020: Barack Obama, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. We assign ``lexical fame'' to be the number and (Zipfian) rank of the (lowercased) mentions made for each individual across all languages. We show that all five political figures have at some point reached extraordinary volume levels of what we define to be ``lexical ultrafame'': An overall rank of approximately…
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Taxonomy
TopicsComputational and Text Analysis Methods · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Media Studies and Communication
