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Whose History We Keep: Benchmarking our Records of the Past’s Protagonists

  • Lennart Finke
  • Sarah Sophie Pohl
  • Luca Lukačević
  • Janek Große
  • Stefan Haas

Historical science compounds millennia of records of human activity, which have become available in digital, searchable form. Focusing on the largest such dataset—Wikidata—we attempt to find quantitative answers to the questions: Whose periods and which places' people do we know most about? What interests us about them? Who are we forgetting? What trends underlie the number of people registered and written about over time? We examine the individuals who have ended up in these datasets in relation to their readership, thereby shedding light not only on history itself but also on the practice of writing it.

  • Keywords:
  • digital history,
  • methodology of history,
  • Open Data,
  • Wikidata,
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Lennart Finke

ETH Zurich, Switzerland - ORCID: 0009-0003-6908-314X

Sarah Sophie Pohl

University of Göttingen, Germany

Stefan Haas

University of Göttingen, Germany

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  12. Zhao, Yu Amy, Shahar Ronen, Kevin Hu, Tiffany Lu, and César A. Hidalgo. 2016. “Pantheon 1.0, a Manually Verified Dataset of Globally Famous Biographies.” Scientific Data 3 (1): 1–16.
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  • Anno di pubblicazione: 2026
  • Pagine: 249-261

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  • Anno di pubblicazione: 2026

Informazioni sul capitolo

Titolo del capitolo

Whose History We Keep: Benchmarking our Records of the Past’s Protagonists

Autori

Lennart Finke, Sarah Sophie Pohl, Luca Lukačević, Janek Große, Stefan Haas

Lingua

Inglese

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-1010-2.30

Opera sottoposta a peer review

Anno di pubblicazione

2026

Copyright

© 2026 Author(s)

Licenza d'uso

CC BY 4.0

Licenza dei metadati

CC0 1.0

Informazioni bibliografiche

Titolo del libro

Wikidata e la ricerca. Condividere esperienze / Wikidata and Research. Sharing Experiences

Sottotitolo del libro

Atti del Convegno, Firenze, 5-6 giugno 2025 / Conference proceedings, Florence, 5-6 June 2025

Curatori

Elena Marangoni, Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo

Opera sottoposta a peer review

Numero di pagine

378

Anno di pubblicazione

2026

Copyright

© 2026 Author(s)

Licenza d'uso

CC BY 4.0

Licenza dei metadati

CC0 1.0

Editore

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-1010-2

ISBN Print

979-12-215-1009-6

eISBN (pdf)

979-12-215-1010-2

Collana

Studi e saggi

ISSN della collana

2704-6478

e-ISSN della collana

2704-5919

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