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.
Read more: “How We’ll Forget John Lennon” In Pantheon, famous people are a proxy for cultural products because biographical data is easy to organize, he says. You can see, for example, that Brazil has produced globally recognized musicians, race car drivers, soccer players, and architects. And you can see exactly who they are: say, bossa nova great Antônio Carlos Jobim or Ayrton Senna, considered one of the greatest Formula 1 drivers in history.
Recently, Hidalgo and colleagues from the United States and Europe published a new study that looks at how our place of residence and language shape who sticks in our collective memory—both locally around the globe. It is one of a series of studies he and colleagues have published over the years that aim to capture the dimensions of collective memory. I recently spoke with Hidalgo about collective amnesia, “sleeping beauties,” localism, and how large language models may influence what we remember and what we forget.
You grew up in Chile, but later lived in the United States and now in France. I actually lived in Chile for five years in my 20s and missed out on certain aspects of U.S. culture during that time, something I still sometimes notice in certain conversations. How does leaving one’s country of origin shape a person’s relationship to collective memory?
Yes, I grew up in Chile, and I was a very curious young man who wanted to learn about the world, so I was a voracious reader. In the ’80s, we would get these local newspaper supplements about science and technology, where I would read about Michael Faraday and Charles Darwin and so forth. One of the things that was very apparent to me when I was reading about all of these people who had contributed to knowledge in physics and knowledge in the arts is that none of them were Chilean.
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