Physicist César Hidalgo has been studying who becomes famous and what shapes our collective memory of popular figures for over a decade. What makes someone like Napoleon a household name across the world, whereas Bernando O’Higgins, a Chilean military officer who helped to lead that nation’s successful battle for independence, is only recognized within a small corner of South America? How did the rise of printing, television and other technologies shape who we tell stories about and remember for decades to come?
A pioneer in the field of economic complexity, Hidalgo’s interest arose in part out of his work on a project called the Observatory of Economic Complexity, which uses trade data to map out the commercial goods different countries make and sell to one another. He wondered if there might also be a way to trace the cultural products that countries produce and spread around the globe—and the forces that drive these scientific, intellectual, and artistic currents. So in 2013, he created another online observatory called pantheon.world, a repository of collective cultural memory.
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