Networked Pantheon: a Relational Database of Globally Famous People

This article presents the Networked Pantheon, a relational database of biographies of globally famous people spanning the last 5,500 years of human history. This information source is intended to complement Pantheon 1.0 (Yu et al., 2016), a dataset that includes temporal, spatial, gender, and occupational information on 11,341 world-renowned people – defined as those who have biographies available in more than 25 languages on Wikipedia. The Networked Pantheon adds information about the biographical links between these historical figures, compiled from hyperlinks between the biographies in the English Wikipedia. This digital method enables techniques from network analysis to be used in studying the biographical relationships between globally famous people. Thus, distinct measures of historical centrality can be calculated for individuals, cities, countries, genders, and occupations. The Networked Pantheon includes indicators of figure centrality in the network of biographical references and provides an approximation of the information flows between various territories, genders, and occupations of famous people over time.