DSpace@MIT

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2014.53Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 72-75).Introduction: In this thesis, I address the challenge of measuring and visualizing global cultural production by presenting a carefully curated dataset containing more than eleven thousand culturally relevant biographies including all countries in the world and much of recorded history. All of these biographies are mapped to a cultural domain using a normalized three level hierarchical classification that we introduce (see Appendix). Also, 95% of all biographies are mapped to a country of birth and 100% to a year of birth. The biographies in this dataset represent the entire set of biographies with a presence in more than 25 language editions of Wikipedia (as of May 2013), representing the largest curated dataset of global cultural production available to date. To quantify the relative importance of each biography, the dataset also incorporates information on the number of languages in which each biography has a presence and the number of page views received by each Wikipedia page in each language. Using this dataset, we developed a visualization engine, Pantheon, to reveal the patterns within the data and open the data for exploration by audiences around the globe. This work aims to motivate future research exploring the quantitative study of historical cultural patterns by allowing audiences to visualize cultural production and highlighting the potential of human achievements.