The Long Tail of Bible People (AKA Jesus is #1!)

As Powerlaw aficionados know, you can find my canonical curve everywhere in human affairs, from word use (Zipf) to wealth distribution (Pareto). So it should come as no surprise that there's a powerlaw distribution of personal popularity, celebrity and individual power, too. What might come as a surprise, however, is that it can even be found in the Bible.

Daniel Foster, from Logos (a Bible software company), writes to explain:

In trying to prioritize some work on a database of all named entities in the Bible, Logos information architect Sean Boisen came up with a numeric weighting system that enabled him to rank all the people in the Bible in order of importance. He based this on frequency of mention along with book and chapter dispersion of mentions.

Details here: http://blog.logos.com/archives/2007/05/the_most_import.html

As you may guess, the names formed a Zipfian Distribution, with 1634 of the 2987 names occurring exactly once in the Bible and the 59 most frequent names accounting for about half of all name mentions in the Bible.

And this is what it looks like. Jesus, unsurprisingly, is #1.

Comments

[joe]

Have you considered or written about a long tail in the 300,000 churches in the US? There are several hundred mega-churches (> 2000 people). And then there's 80% of churches with less than 200 people.

I'm trying to gather some empirical data to graph, and I'll bet it looks very much like your quintessential long tail distribution.

joe

[Hakan]

First, the composite metric really does change the rankings: Levi is #15 by this method, but #52 if you only ranked by frequency. Likewise, King Saul would be #51 if you only ranked by book mentions, because he's mentioned in just a few books: but he's clearly one of the most important characters in those books, and so it seems fitting that incorporating frequency and chapter dispersion boosts him up to #10 in the composite metric rank.

[Isabella]

Male dominated religion. Bleah. Not even enough space for the women in the tail.

[worth]

I take it "God" or "the Lord" would relegate all other names to the long tail extremities and has therefore been excluded?

[wow powerleveling]

it's not too bad,i agree with your point.

[fasdf]

文秘网 糖尿病 心脑血管 工作总结 单位工作总结 个人工作总结 半年工作总结 教师工作总结 教学工作总结 财务工作总结 班主任工作总结 党支部工作总结 办公室工作总结 2007年度工作总结 党员工作总结 党员民主评议 民主评议 述职报告 个人述职报告 年度述职报告 年终述职报告 教师述职报告 小学教师述职报告 校长述职报告 财务述职报告 述职述廉报告 办公室主任述职报告 领导述职报告 领导班子述职报告 学习心得体会 党员学习心得体会 入党心得体会 培训心得体会 工作心得体会 学习党章心得体会 作风建设心得体会 作风建设年心得体会 八荣八耻心得体会 学习八荣八耻心得体会 科学发展观心得体会 构建和谐社会心得体会 新义务教育法心得体会 反腐倡廉心得体会 党课学习心得体会 党课学习心得体会 反腐倡廉心得体会 实习报告 会计实习报告 财务会计实习报告 毕业实习报告 计算机实习报告 银行实习报告 教育实习报告 自我鉴定 个人鉴定 政府工作报告 班主任工作计划 个人工作计划 财务工作计划 党支部工作计划 市场调研报告 新农村建设调研报告 优秀党务工作者材料 优秀党员先进事迹材料 入党申请书 安全演讲稿 演讲稿 庆七一演讲稿 七一演讲稿

[kabin]

thanks...
Kabin
Konteyner