Celebrity

The Chicago Edition

Mark Algee-Hewitt, Erik Fredner, Charlotte Lindeman, Laura McGrath, J.D. Porter

The Project

Celebrity Studies

• Associated with 20th and 21st centuries
• Rise of mass media
• Entertainment industries
• Audiences

The Pilot Study

Principles of Celebrity

Principles of Celebrity

1. Frequency
1. Famous people are mentioned often. (Being mentioned often makes someone famous.)
2. Connectedness
• No celebrity exists in a vacuum. (Celebrities are connected to other celebrities)
3. Mobility
• Celebrities are celebrated, no matter what they do. (Famous for being famous.)

Celebrity vs. Fame vs. Newsworthiness

Newsworthy: Of sufficient interest to warrant mention in the news; regarded by the media as meriting such attention; topical.

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Fame: The condition of being much talked about. Chiefly in good sense: Reputation derived from great achievements; celebrity, honour, renown.

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Celebrity: The state or fact of being well known, widely discussed, or publicly esteemed. Later usually: personal fame or renown as manifested in (and determined by) public interest and media attention.

• Advent of mass media
• “Famous for being famous”

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When does someone who is in the news become famous?

When does someone who is famous become a celebrity?

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Celebrity vs. Fame vs. Newsworthiness

Premise: Celebrity, Fame, and Newsworthiness as context-dependent

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Corpora

ProQuest American Periodicals Series

• American periodicals published between 1740 and the early 21st century
• Newspapers of record
• Magazines
• ProQuest’s ad copy: “Titles range from Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine and America's first scientific journal, Medical Repository; popular magazines such as Vanity Fair and Ladies' Home Journal; regional and niche publications; and groundbreaking journals like The Dial, Puck, and McClure's.”

ProQuest American Periodicals Series

• 43 billion dictionary-valid tokens
• For scale, Gale American fiction has about 1 billion tokens
• Also for scale: about 43,000 Prousts
• 700 GB of XML
• 81 million documents
• Each document is an XML file with editorial metadata and OCR text

American Periodicals: number of articles per decade

Number of articles by place of publication

Top collocates of “celebrity” in American Periodicals

Prominence of literary celebrity in American Periodicals

Pilot study: < 1% of the corpus

Major Chicago papers, 1919-1939

The Chicago Defender

• Founded 1905
• Ceased print in 2019; still online
• Historically black paper
• Motto: “American Race Prejudice Must Be Destroyed”
• Based in Chicago, but covers black life across the U.S.
• 110,190 articles in sample
• 24,726,373 tokens in sample

The Chicago Tribune

• Founded 1847
• Still in print
• Historically white paper
• Motto: “The American Paper for Americans”
• Primarily focused on news in Chicago
• 668,664 articles in sample
• 357,295,825 tokens in sample

Tribune and Defender tokens annually

Tribune number of articles by type

Tribune number of tokens per article type

Tribune tokens per year by type

Defender number of articles by type

Defender number of tokens per article type

Defender tokens per year by type

How we found people

• Using Stanford CoreNLP on Sherlock, full parse of the Chicago papers
• Extract all named entities identified by CoreNLP as persons
• Manually cull false positives
• E.g. CoreNLP frequently misidentified streets as people, e.g. “N. Wabash”
• Use positive IDs of real historical persons to generate metadata for analyses

Notes on method

• Poor OCR yields a high number of false negatives (i.e. people we missed)
• Since we’re interested in high-frequency people, some false negatives are ok if errors are random
• E.g. Some names may be more likely to yield OCR errors
• Rare or unique names easier to disambiguate than common ones
• Particular problem in The Defender

John P. Greer,* horse with a weirdly-human name

* John P. Greer not pictured

Under-representing women, over-representing husbands

• Both Defender and Tribune conventionally refer to married women in the form “Mrs. John Smith”
• True even in cases when wives are more famous than their husbands
• Computationally, this tends to overcount husbands and undercount women, especially women who marry multiple times
• (It just so happens that the NYT began running a new series on this convention this morning)

Celebrity Connections

• These are names that appeared in articles together more than 10 times
• Filtered for people who appeared in both the Tribune and the Defender
• Also filtered out unresolvable names and people who mostly wrote for the newspapers

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Sports

• Joe Louis: Champion of the World
• Boxers are very densely interconnected
• Top four connections by weight involve Louis
• 15 of the top 20 are boxers
• Big three sports:
• Boxing
• Baseball
• Golf

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Politics

• Regions:
• Local
• Presidents
• Historic civil rights leaders
• The rest of the world
• No connections to the main group

Hollywood

• Deeply interconnected
• Just three connections to the rest of the celebrities
• Quin Ryan & Earl Hines
• Benny Goodman & Fletcher Henderson
• Bette Davis & Bill Robinson

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More on Hollywood

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The King of Hollywood

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• Clark Gable is second only to Joe Louis in co-occurrences with other celebs
• However, his connections are extremely insular; few celebs need him to get to anyone else

Bette Davis eyes

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• Her betweenness centrality is extremely high because she’s got the best route out of this cluster

Global view again

Divided by paper

Locals only

Local Society:

• Connections between local figures
• Politicians
• Symphony Conductors
• Business people
• Socialites
• Describes how power flows
• Also identifies key forgotten figures

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The Surprising Life of Mrs. Jacob Baur

Or, From the Society Pages to the Front Pages

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The Surprising Life of Mrs. Jacob Baur

Or, From the Society Pages to the Front Pages

• Born Bertha Duppler in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, in 1877
• Moved to Chicago from Indiana in the last years of the nineteenth century
• Secretary to Postmaster Charles U. Gordon.
• In her spare time she studied law and graduated from a local college.
• Married Jacob Baur of Terra Haute in 1908
• Jacob passes away in 1912; his business concerns include Baur Drugs, Federal Brass Company, and Liquid Carbonics Corp which are left to his associates

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(Chicago Tribune, 1928)

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The Surprising Life of Mrs. Jacob Baur

Or, From the Society Pages to the Front Pages

From 1920 - 1926 she appeared frequently in the Tribune's Society Pages

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Tribune, 28 July, 1921

"Expensive, but-" (pg 17)

Rosemary Baur of 1100 Lake Shore drive, costs her mother, Mrs. Jacob Baur, $42 a day, $1,250 a month, or $15,000 a year to keep her.

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Rosemary is only 10 years old and yet her dolls and school books and party dresses, to say nothing off her French maid and her governess, and gasoline to take her for daily airing about the part are very expensive.

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The Surprising Life of Mrs. Jacob Baur

Or, From the Society Pages to the Front Pages

She was an active member of society:

• On the board of the Chicago Symphony
• Chairman of the Women's Committee of the Chicago Liberty Loan Organization
• President of Chicago's Equal Suffrage Association (1919)

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The Surprising Life of Mrs. Jacob Baur

Or, From the Society Pages to the Front Pages

"Should Women Seek Political Jobs?" (Page A6)

Tribune, October 5, 1919

Mrs. Baur to the Rescue

This was too much for Mrs. Jacob Baur, president of the Chicago Equal Suffrage society.

When her turn to speak came, she courteously informed the women that she believed women had just as much right to hold office as men, and they should hold office if they could.

“Of course,” she added, “I don’t think its right to go out for office until you’ve got the power, but when we do get the vote, and a capable woman presents herself for office, I think she ought to be supported just as a man would be.”

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The Surprising Life of Mrs. Jacob Baur

Or, From the Society Pages to the Front Pages

"Mrs. Jacob Baur, As Anti-Dry, Out for Congress"

Tribune, Jan 14, 1926 (page 1)

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Declaring for liberalization of the Volstead act, Mrs. Jacob. Baur, business woman, yesterday announced her candidacy for congress in the Ninth district.

Mrs. Baur will oppose Congressman Fred A. Britten in the Republican primaries next April.

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The Surprising Life of Mrs. Jacob Baur

Or, From the Society Pages to the Front Pages

Crowd demands Bertha; Deneen Men Are Jeered (page 7)

Mrs. Baur Says She’ll Run Fred Out of Congress

Tribune, March 26, 1926

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Britten, Bertha End Campaigns; Each Sees win (page 3)

Tribune, April 12, 1926

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Bertha Baur defeated by Fred Britten (page 3)

Tribune, April 14, 1926

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The Surprising Life of Mrs. Jacob Baur

Or, From the Society Pages to the Front Pages

Britten Urges U.S. Inquiry of Primary Vote: Gunmen Ruled His District, House is Told (Page 5)

Tribune, July 9, 1926

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Calling attention to the fact that he had defeated Mrs. Bertha Baur in the recent primary, Mr. Britten made the charge that armed gunmen, known to the police, went from one polling place to another threatening officials at the polls with murder unless they unlawfully changed their ballots in favor of his rival.”

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The Surprising Life of Mrs. Jacob Baur

Or, From the Society Pages to the Front Pages

Carbonic Grows Under a Woman’s Hand (page 5)

Tribune, 1928

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The Liquid Carbonic corporation, a Chicago concern, manufactures more soda fountains and carbonic gas than any other organization in the world. […] Now it is more than a 13 million dollar concern.

The widow is Mrs. Berta Baur, one of Chicago’s leading citizens, a social figure, a patron of the opera and the arts, a leader in feminist affairs and a politician of considerable talent.

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The Object Life of Celebrities

• How are celebrities represented in terms of the words that attach to them in the texts?
• Specifically, what kinds of objects attach to particular kinds of celebrities?
• For each found and corrected name, identify all sentences containing the name
• Collect all nouns within each sentence
• Filter nouns through lists of "objects" in the 19th and 20th century.

The Object Life of Celebrities: Socialites

The Object Life of Celebrities: Actors

The Object Life of Celebrities: Golfers

Network of Celebrity Types by Object

Network of Celebrity Objects by Type

Next Steps

Next Steps

Mobility Principle

• How do these figures move between newspaper sections? (i.e., Advertisements vs. Features, In-domain vs. Out-domain)

Methodology

• What is the most accurate way to scale name mentions over time?

Questions

What are those documents like?

• Most articles shorter than 300 words
• 50th percentile is 233 words with stdev of 123 words
• Short articles include, e.g. birth/death notices, marriage announcements, classified ads, etc.
• On average, OCR accuracy of 82.2%
• Aggregate accuracy suppressed by OCR error-prone document types (e.g. stock reports)
• Different papers have different error rates. Many individual papers in the 90% + range.
• ProQuest metadata created by hand
• Article titles either transcribed or programmatically assigned
• E.g. for programmatic title, “Advertisement No. 6”
• 33% of articles have human-written abstracts summarizing the article
• E.g. “Socially prominent Americans were received at a presentation party in Buckingham Palace today for the first time since before the war.”

Number of articles per metadata category

Tribune and Defender articles annually

Tribune proportion of tokens per year by type

Defender proportion of tokens per year by type