Assassins, abolitionists, and astronomers: Who fares better? (spoiler alert, good girls finish last)

As I’ve been revising my earlier piece about Wikipedia’s notable woman problem, based in part on the excellent work done by Alison Booth and the team at Collective Biographies of Women (CBW), I’ve started digging in to some of their extensive materials available for a sample corpora of six women, which is very cool in ways that I’ve yet to fully explore. However, as I played around today it occurred to me, that just as Booth has done some work comparing the saintly Sister Dora with the sinful Lola Montez, three of the other subjects who have deeper data also make for an interesting comparison group. In some preliminary work, I’ve crudely compared Frances Trollope (British novelist & abolitionist, green circle), Charlotte Corday (famed assassin of the French Revolution, red circle) and a Caroline Herschel (astronomer, grey circle) and traced them through the CBW corpus, Wikipedia and JSTOR data for research to get some idea of how significant they have been to different audiences. This is only the start, but the results intrigued me.

In the corpora of Collective Biographies of Women, the women are not very different in the number of volumes in which they appears. Herschel just tops Corday, with Trollope close behind(figure 1). However, the women’s popular peaked at different times, Corday, who appears in volumes from 1833 to 1935 peaks in 1890–1891 (perhaps influenced by centennial of the French revolution ?). Herschel peaks in 1877 (1854–1937). Trollope on the other hand starts with her peak in 1883 and only declines from there (range 1883–1929). Booth considers Trollope’s fate in “Frances Trollope in a Victorian Network of Women’s Biographies” concluding that Anthony Trollope’s brief sketch of his mother in his own 1883 biography might account for the interest in her.

However, when looking at sibling relationships, how CBW refers to women who co-exist within the same volumes, Corday is the clear winner followed surprisingly by Trollope. Lady scientists apparently fit less well in these volumes, which tended to run along two narratives, exemplars or cautionary tales. Highly bifurcated depictions of of women’s lives leave little room for women of achievement in male fields.

In extending prosopography into the 21st century, I turned to Wikipedia. I examined five Wikipedia variables, length of page, number of edits and editors, links to each woman’s page, and the number of page views in the prior year (July 2015 to July 2016).

Just as she is the most present in the CBW corpus, Caroline Herschel also has the longest Wikipedia entry (figure 3) and the page that is most viewed (figure 4). In terms of number of editors (figure 5)and edits (figure 6) as well as mentions in Wikipedia (figure 7), however, Corday coming out on top. Poor Frances Trollope fares poorly in Wikipedia, dwarfed by the exciting assassin and the pioneering astronomer.

When it comes to sheer number, the length of entry, girl wins, hands down, with Herchel’s entry longer by one third than Corday’s.

Looking at Page views from the past year (July 1, 2015 to July 11, 2016), Herschel wins with more than double the page hits.

In terms of Wikipedians interested in writing about them, Corday and her exciting escapades just edge out Herschel in both number of editors and number of edits. However, it is worth noting that while Corday’s edits have tapered off since a peak since 2011 (an overall trend in Wikipedia in general), Herschel has had a sharp uptick in March 2016 when it became the subject of some disruptive editing. It is also worth noting that Trollope has drawn a much much smaller number of editors and edits, far more disproportionate than in the CBW corpus. One other metric, months in which no edits occurred on a page is also interesting to analyze. Dividing the number of those months by the number of months the page has existed provides information about how idle the page has been. Trollope’s page has been inactive 42% of the time, Herschel’s 18% and Corday 13%.

Comparing Corday to her victim Jean-Paul Marat puts women’s presence in Wikipedia in larger perspective. A comparison of edits on their page by date show just how little attention female historical figures get relative to men

What about the integration of these figures across Wikipedia beyond their own pages, a persistent issue for women as measured by their mentions (determined using the BYU corpus interface)? Corday is also the clear winner here, mentioned more than double the times of Hershel.

Because my key question is here is how different groups of people understand historical significance, what Wikipedia calls notability, I also wanted a contemporary metric for how much scholarly folks have written about these same women. Using the JSTOR data for research portal, I searched simply for the number of items that contained each woman’s name. Here Trollope finally moves out of last place.

At first I thought this shift must be due to the composition of the JSTOR corpus. However, the number of items categorizes as “humanities” and “science and mathematics” journals are roughly equally.

The answer seems to be chronological, Trollope experienced a spike in articles in the 1950s, while Herschel doesn’t experience a similar increase until the late 1970s. I suspect this has much to do with the fact that feminist literary scholars were a larger and earlier group than feminist historians of science, but I need to dig deeper. I’m also curious about how Corday remains at the top in JSTOR.