Popularity of personalities in society as driven by news

Authors

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