Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: Deceased public figures are often said to live on in collective memory. We quantify this phenomenon by tracking mentions of 2,362 public figures in English-language online news and social media (Twitter) 1 y before and after death. We measure the sharp spike and rapid decay of attention following death and model collective memory as a composition of communicative and cultural memory. Clustering reveals four patterns of postmortem memory, and regression analysis shows that boosts in media attention are largest for premortem popular anglophones who died a young, unnatural death; that long-term boosts are smallest for leaders and largest for artists; and that, while both the news and Twitter are triggered by young and unnatural deaths, the news additionally curates collective memory when old persons or leaders die. Overall, we illuminate the age-old question of who is remembered by society, and the distinct roles of news and social media in collective memory formation.
Authors: Robert West, Jure Leskovec, Christopher Potts
Institutions: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Stanford University
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Awards: The Stanford Data Science Collaboratory, Collaborative Research: Framework: Software: CINES: A Scalable Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Innovation in Network Engineering and Science, G4734634991, Expeditions: Collaborative Research: Global Pervasive Computational Epidemiology, RAPID: Collaborative Research: Computational Drug Repurposing for COVID-19, Modeling and Improving the Content and Usage of Multilingual Online Encyclopedias, G993971353
OpenAlex ID: W3157875203