Popularity of personalities in society as driven by news

Authors

Abigail Mae Jayin ⋅ PH National Institute of Physics, University of the Philippines Diliman
Anjali Tarun ⋅ PH National Institute of Physics, University of the Philippines Diliman
Rene Batac ⋅ PH National Institute of Physics, University of the Philippines Diliman
Erika Fille Legara ⋅ PH Institute for High Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology and Research
Johnrob Bantang ⋅ PH National Institute of Physics, University of the Philippines Diliman

Abstract

We extract names of individuals in a yearlong archive of articles of a major Philippine daily in English for the year 2010. Aggregated and per-section data reveal stable Zipf’s law distributions when name rank R is plotted with frequency, f(R) ∝ R−β, with scaling exponent β ≈ 0.60, which indicates a less steep plot compared to that of common (i.e. non-name) dictionary words. This shows that a highly dynamic system such as the society obeys a scale-free power law distribution. Also, the lifetime of high-ranked individuals is tracked, revealing a ‘time constant’ for decay lifetime of names particularly after the elections. Aside from real-time quantitative characterization of society, trends manifested by the name statistics in news may provide a framework in predicting possi- ble “extreme events” in society, like violent upheavals and mass movements.

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Issue

2012: Proceedings of the 30th Samahang Pisika ng Pilipinas Physics Congress

Article ID

SPP2012-PA-4

Section

Poster Session PA

Published

2012-10-22

How to Cite

[1]

AM Jayin, A Tarun, R Batac, EF Legara, and J Bantang, Popularity of personalities in society as driven by news, Proceedings of the Samahang Pisika ng Pilipinas 30, SPP2012-PA-4 (2012). URL: https://proceedings.spp-online.org/article/view/SPP2012-PA-4.